Goldman Sachs is a 150-year-old financial institution, but its embrace of social media and emerging platforms is avant-garde. By partnering with innovative, digitally native publishers, joining the platforms where our target audience is spending time, and developing serialized, custom, timely content via our in-house content studio, we've built a best-in-class brand and marketing strategy.
We harness the intellectual capital of Goldman Sachs to add our voice to the public narrative through a variety of relevant content series and formats including videos, podcasts, infographics, newsletters and custom social programs.
To disseminate this content we partner with cutting-edge edge publishers to share programming on platforms where our audience is already spending time, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat and, most recently, Instagram.
For us, maintaining a strong brand is critical. Strong brands focus consistently on distributing narratives because people want to better understand what these companies do– their mission and their vision– and more importantly, how that impacts the communities they live in. Giving back to communities is important to Goldman Sachs and we aim to drive economic growth and make a difference globally through our 10,000 Small Business and 10,000 Women initiatives. By illuminating what we do, our ideas and our global impact, we not only drive conversation and raise awareness of our social and philanthropic commitments, we also position ourselves as an expert thought leader and an employer of choice.
The current media landscape is rapidly evolving and the demand for substantive, ongoing dialogue between brands and their target audience has become commonplace. Our approach is to reach our audience where they are spending time in unexpected and visually compelling ways.
We run a robust, always-on social strategy across major platforms– Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Spotify– and execute partnerships with cutting-edge media brands including Cheddar, TicToc x Bloomberg, Axios and theSkimm. As first-movers in emerging platforms and ad format offerings, we leverage all social has to offer (such as running sponsored content on Snapchat and Instagram Stories, and utilizing Instant Experience Units on Facebook).
Our seasoned storytellers create an enormous amount of content in a range of formats, including infographics, podcasts and videos. When we create content, we always ask a set of core questions: Who is our target audience? What can we provide them that is valuable and that we are uniquely positioned to offer them?
Because of our global footprint and internal expertise, we're able to contribute a credible voice on a variety of macroeconomic topics, offering information and perspectives that can help them understand the global economic landscape. But our thought leadership extends beyond the strictly financial realm. Through our BRIEFINGS newsletter and Exchanges at Goldman Sachs podcast, our audience can learn about developments shaping markets, industries and the global economy from experts at the firm. In our new series, The Long & Short of It, our people break down what's behind the biggest trends in areas such as artificial intelligence, music streaming and genomic medicine. In our popular Talks at GS series, we convene the world's top thinkers, ranging from David Beckham to Katie Couric to share insights shaping the world. Our diversity of recurring series enables us to reach a wide and multifaceted following. In doing so, we not only highlight our position as a financial expert, but we extend our audience reach and become a trusted leading thinker across disciplines.
Another unique facet to Goldman Sachs' digital footprint are our dedicated accounts for the 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses programs on Twitter, and corresponding content on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. While our 10,000 Women initiative invests in women entrepreneurs in emerging countries by offering business education, mentorship and networking, and access to capital, our 10,000 Small Businesses program provides small business entrepreneurs in the US and UK with access to education, capital and business support. When we hosted the 10,000 Small Businesses Summit: The Big Power of Small Business in February (a two-day gathering where small business owners heard from industry leaders and experts about optimizing business growth), we leveraged a comprehensive social media campaign to drive awareness of the event and the program. Not only did the campaign yield an unprecedented amount of engagement which had 99% positive sentiment, it sparked a viral hashtag, #MakeSmallBig, which trended #1 on Twitter in Washington, D.C., where the event took place, and #5 nationally.
In 2018, Goldman Sachs launched 13K social posts, bringing in 2.6B impressions, 900M video views and 5.7M non-video engagements. Over the course of 2018, we increased our total social media followers by 24% to a total of 2.6M, all while never running promoted account ads.
