Tree SMART Trade

Social media content + strategy

tree smart trade

Social media can be a great way to expand the audience for your science! But what to post? And how to frame your work? Those are questions that need a little strategy.

We recently partnered with @TreeSMARTTrade to launch #StopForestPests - a 3-month, 3-posts-per-week Twitter campaign targeting invasive forest pests.

Project outcomes

In the first 3 weeks of the campaign, Tree SMART Trade gained 3x more followers, 4x more profile views, and 10x more impressions than they had in the entire previous year!

Read on to learn more about how we did it…

the strategy

To help people connect with this big, global challenge, we wanted to help them first connect to a smaller, more approachable case study - maple trees.

Maple trees are one of the most important groups of trees for planting in lawns, along streets, and in parks. Many display striking autumn colors; Several yield maple syrup; And others provide valuable wood for building furniture, baseball bats, and musical instruments. Maples are more than just trees - they are a part of our history, lives, and culture.

But maple trees are also the preferred food for the Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis), an invasive, wood-boring insect. The beetle was first discovered in 1996 and now currently infests areas in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, and most recently South Carolina.

We designed the #StopForestPests campaign to celebrate the cultural and ecological importance of maple trees, as a way to bring the issue of forest pests into people’s everyday lives. Tweets explore all that maples have given us, from baseball bats to famous guitars to maple syrup, and all we stand to lose if this forest pest takes hold.

In the third month of the campaign, we focus on tweets that empower action against the Asian longhorned beetle. We talk about policy, action, and solutions. We end the campaign with a push to sign a petition, calling for greater regulation of shipping materials and live plants that harbor insect pests.

Explore some of the media we’ve created for the campaign below…

intro film

story of a beloved tree

As a first step in this campaign, we created a short film to help people think about the value of trees. Trees are our secret keepers, our shelter providers, the bearers of our tire swings and tree houses. They give us SO much - shouldn’t we protect them from harm?

This film was used as the pinned tweet during the campaign, was emailed out to introduce the campaign to others, and was repurposed across social media platforms, like Facebook.

tweet series

fun, interactive, educational

The brand for this campaign was dynamic, interactive, and educational. We engaged audience members through interactive tweets and polls as much as possible. We used humor to lighten the intensity of the issue and to attract a new audience. Our goal was to build a campaign that was identifiably Tree SMART Trade.