For the Raytheon digital and social team, 2014 was a year of transformation. Our principal objective was to increase reach and engagement to improve public brand perception and awareness for our company on social media. Raytheon's team was able to accomplish these strategies through strong leadership, new policies, an expanded budget, and more manpower. We were able to successfully collaborate as an enterprise-wide team to foster a cohesive social media presence as a government defense contractor. By the end of the year, Raytheon's social media followers and engagement rates had more than doubled. Additionally, our new Instagram account brought an unmatched engagement rate as a percentage of followers.
In 2014, Raytheon's social media channels experienced a sweeping transformation, as our follower count and engagement rates skyrocketed. Our central goal for 2014 was to improve public brand perception and awareness through increased reach and engagement. With more resources at our fingertips than ever before, we knew 2014 was the year to blow the lid off of Raytheon social media. We were able to achieve this by displaying our innovative defense technologies in a clear and captivating way across our social channels, and encouraging our fans to engage with our content through a variety of means. Our new Instagram account was the perfect way to capture Raytheon's culture of innovation in a strong, visual way, and our fans responded to the striking imagery very positively. Fans also responded positively to our first ever Twitter chat, held this year, which focused on corporate responsibility.
Our social team incorporated several new strategies this year in order to push the significant changes needed. These included increased paid promotion of Facebook and Twitter, the creation and promotion of the aforementioned Instagram account, and stronger, more well-defined team policies for both monitoring social feeds and engaging with fans and followers on a daily basis. Our increased usage of analytics assisted with this - including our comprehensive social media audience survey, which allowed us to better understand our fans and adjust marketing tactics accordingly. Raytheon's team was able to accomplish these strategies through strong leadership, an expanded budget, and robust collaboration efforts, as well as an increase in the size of the team itself.
Our social team knew that in order to gain more fans, we also needed our content to be more cohesive and consistent than ever before. As a large international company with over 63,000 employees, taking on this issue has certainly been a challenge. However, by implementing clearer social media policies across the four businesses within Raytheon and increasing communication between them, we have been able to meet this challenge. To strengthen this effort we used analytics, including a broad audience survey, to improve our targeting significantly. All of this was supported by an improvement in the quality of the content Raytheon.com is publishing after bringing highly qualified journalists aboard this year, as well as the incredible innovations our employees are developing daily.
Our top campaign for the year revolved around Veterans Day and Raytheon's annual Week of Service. This campaign represented the highest engagement rates of 2014, thanks to its wide scope and comprehensive nature across all channels. We knew that this campaign would be a perfect way to reach people who are current or former members of the military, a demographic which make up a large portion of our followers. Through six Twitter campaigns, four boosted Facebook posts, and two sponsored LinkedIn posts, we successfully engaged with 27,000 people. Our Facebook and Twitter campaigns were linked by our "Hashtags4Heroes" hashtag, #HT4H. We promoted compelling content relating to Raytheon's commitment to helping veterans in our community to our own fans, as well as military personnel and fans of non-profits for veterans. Additionally, we promoted a series of employee veteran photos on our Instagram account. The responses to all promotions within the campaign were overwhelmingly positive. Fans were touched by our commitment to helping veterans in need, as well as our public honoring of military personnel.
By the end of 2014, our follower count had increased from 169,500 to 416,400. Our engagement rates across all pre-existing social channels had roughly doubled. Our team is exceedingly proud of these hard-earned results, and are confident that we can continue to surpass our goals in 2015.
