Social media breaks down traditional barriers to communication and facilitates a two-way dialogue between citizens and government officials. This not only facilitates government institutions to have dynamic and new communication modes to communicate with individuals, but also enables governments to better understand public concerns and priorities, empowering citizens by giving them a voice. As a result, the integration of social media into government communication strategies is not just an enhancement of outreach, it represents a significant evolution in how governments engage with their citizens, ultimately aiming to build trust and foster a sense of public participation.

Social media has existed and continued to evolve over the past 20 years and social protection organizations have been early adopters of this trend. They have leveraged social media as part of multi‑mode and multi‑channel strategy aimed at generating awareness and improving service delivery (Misuraca, 2010; Lee‑Archer, 2012; DMFA, 2024).

Figure 1. Social media timeline

Source: Broadbandsearch.net

The COVID-19 crisis accelerated the use of social media by social security organizations, given the need to scale up assistance and cover previously excluded groups (Lowe et al., 2023). Social media is being increasingly used by organizations to:

• Inform people of entitlements, rights and obligations
• Provide news related to policy and programme initiatives and organizational matters
• Reach out to groups of people traditionally hard to reach such as youth and migrants
• Personalize the bureaucratic face of the social security administrations
• Provide a channel for people to express complaints, issues and compliments
• Identify trends or potential problems as they emerge and before they become more significant issues affecting the brand or reputation of the administration
• Provide forums for people to discuss and debate matters of public interest
• Market services and new products

The International Social Security Association (ISSA) has been supporting its member organizations to realize these gains through the ISSA Guidelines on Communication by Social Security Administrations (ISSA, 2022). Guideline 10 outlines how agencies can make strategic use of new communication technology and social media.

This article highlights how member organizations from Asia and the Pacific leverage these guidelines to harness the power of social media in delivering customer-centric services.

Good practices from Asia and the Pacific

The role of social media in shaping stakeholder participation and enhancing service delivery has become increasingly vital for social security organizations across Asia and the Pacific. Representing approximately 60 per cent of the global social media user base, the following examples demonstrate novel ways in which organizations in the region are exploring these new and emerging technologies.

Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, India

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) of India caters to the social security needs of the organized sector through three schemes, namely, the Provident Fund, the Insurance Scheme and the Pension Scheme. The EPFO developed a communication framework document (CFD) to effectively engage with its large customer base of nearly 300 million members, 7.5 million pensioners and 400,000 employers. The CFD sought to inform, educate, and handle grievances across these diverse stakeholders (Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, 2024).

The CFD includes principles of communication, management of communication, guidelines for external communication, evaluation strategy of external communication, and communication strategy for EPFO employees. The CFD helps the organization establish a holistic communication approach and utilizes new channels like YouTube, Facebook Live, SMSs, WhatsApp, webinars, SMSs, monthly district-level camps, experience centres and women empowerment desks. The multimodal communication plan is expected to bridge the communication and information gap between stakeholders and the EPFO. The EPFO closely tracks engagement in terms of number of views for social media campaigns and the increase in subscriber base post specific campaigns.

Social Security Administering Body for the Health Sector, Indonesia

The Social Security Administering Body for the Health Sector (BPJS Kesehatan) in Indonesia uses social marketing techniques and AI-driven technology to improve engagement with its nearly 269 million participants, which is 96 per cent of the Indonesian population (Social Security Administering Body for the Health Sector, 2024). With 9,270 employees, each one must deal with around 29,000 insurance participants. As a result, creative use of social media is indispensable to proactively and cost-effectively reach audiences given the high participant-to-staff ratio.

The organization’s social marketing strategy uses digital communication to provide real-time access to information, through songs, podcasts, and video advertising. It employs creative ways to overcome budget constraints by encouraging staff to create, compose, and sing their own songs and videos. For instance, songs by the President Director of BPJS Kesehatan on YouTube reach 578,991 views with 3,406 likes. The programme aims to maintain user attention, stimulate positive reactions and encourage engagement with exposure to personally targeted communication. Key performance indicators include the organizational image index; the participant programme knowledge index; the participant access to content information; customer satisfaction index; and socialization effectiveness index.

Central Provident Fund Board, Singapore

The Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) in Singapore sought to better engage people between the ages of 13 and 35 in the concepts of social security and financial literacy. They developed “Catching Insomnia”, a digital escape game hosted on a metaverse platform (Central Provident Fund Board, 2024). The game aims to instil the importance of making smart decisions with money and life, not emotional ones. By leveraging the popularity of escape games and introducing home-based learning during COVID-19, the game was designed to challenge young minds and create an emotionally engaging experience.

The escape rooms were designed to elicit certain emotions and behaviours of players in reaction to stimulus. To elicit fear, threats were introduced to simulate the vagaries of life so that the players’ natural inclination would be to seek protection. Potions were introduced for players to protect themselves, mirroring the insurance world where companies may call their products differently but offer similar benefits. Targets to be achieved included increasing content relevance, enhancing the learning experience, making the game accessible and appealing for business-to-business collaborations, and earning media value and recognition.

The game has been featured in The Straits Times, on several youth frequented platforms and has won the Recognition of Excellence Award 2024 by OpenGov Asia. Beyond the numbers, the intangible success of the game includes leveraging partnerships with content creators and the private sector while providing youth with meaningful roles.

Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan

The Quick Pension Dashboard (Public Pension Simulator) in Japan was developed to alleviate retirement- and pension‑related anxiety resulting from the large time gap between enrolment and benefit disbursement (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2024). The dashboard, launched in April 2022, uses advanced public relations technologies and a market-in mindset to help individuals visualize their future public pension payouts from a young age. The dashboard offers user-friendly estimates of individual pension amounts, allowing variations in work and lifestyle choices.

The development process involved establishing a “Pension Public Relations Committee” consisting of experts in public relations, marketing, financial and economic affairs, and conducting extensive multi-year visits to government departments, universities, and research institutions in various countries. The Ministry also worked with 12 financial technology (fintech) companies in Japan in a demonstration to test whether the Quick Pension Dashboard programme could be included in a commercial app. The dashboard was publicized heavily using YouTube influencers (see videos 1, 2, 3 and 4. The dashboard’s innovative features include a simple interface, easy-to-understand graphs, QR codes on annual pension statements, and a world-first function that allows users to intuitively grasp the “time axis” to avoid cognitive bias in estimation. The dashboard has also been developed and released with mobile phone in mind, with approximately 80 per cent of users accessing it via mobile.

Maldives Pension Administration Office

The Maldives Pension Administration Office (MPAO) combined social media with traditional channels to drive the migration of all employers and move records of over 100,000 members registered in the Maldives retirement pension scheme to the new Koshaaru portal within a tight timeline of six months (Maldives Pension Administration Office, 2024). The swift migration was key to avoid the costs and complexity of simultaneously maintaining parallel systems. The hybrid communication model involved marketing communications, promoting the new portal and its benefits, and providing tailored training and support to meet the diverse needs of employers dispersed over 187 islands of the Maldives archipelago. The YouTube training modules played a key role in effective communication and training. Assistance was provided by proactively reaching out and encouraging employers to attend the training, with follow-ups conducted through phone calls and emails to ensure completion. Support was also provided through a range of services including a call centre, live chat via the portal, email and face-to-face support.

The marketing communication campaign generated high media coverage for the MPAO, with discussions attracting an audience larger than any other marketing campaigns conducted by them. Over 90 per cent of the 2,000 employers completed the sessions online, with the online guides the most viewed content posted on the MPAO’s YouTube channel.

Results

Table 1 summarizes the results of these ISSA member organizations through their good practices.

Critical success factors

Understanding user behaviour and expectations on social media is key to create engaging content. In Japan, the Ministry developed prototypes and conducted repeated user tests to produce user-friendly content. This was particularly important considering the diverse spectrum of individuals encompassed by social insurance schemes, such as students, self-employed individuals, dependents and employees, each possessing unique attributes that influence their benefit perceptions. Indonesia also took steps to understand how social media can influence social security decisions. Organizations also identified influencers with reach and brand alignment to exponentially improve audience engagement.

Social media should be part of a holistic communication strategy given varying levels of digital and financial literacy among stakeholders. In both the Maldives and India, physical channels were used to complement social media endeavours – this hybrid approach was critical to their success. Designing social media outreach as part of a broader communications strategy also avoids the risk of employers and employees being confused by inconsistent messaging across platforms.

While budgetary constraints are ever present, countries found innovative ways to overcome them. In Singapore, the team tapped on the CPFB’s experimentation fund which is a pre-designated monetary resource for officers to purchase anything that advances innovation. In both Singapore and Indonesia, existing personnel with interest in social media and communications were given the space to innovate and think “out-of-the-box”. An added advantage of such staff-led creation approach was that internal ownership and buy-in was considerably higher than it may have been with external suppliers. Singapore also leveraged technology to drastically reduce the costs of gamification. By choosing an open-source game development solution to create a fictional world in the metaverse, it built and released the game quickly with reasonable performance i.e., within four months as opposed to a year for built-from-scratch games. It also provided the advantage of flexibility, scalability, manpower and cost efficiency, plus access to a large pool of community resources when seeking ideas/workarounds to game development issues. For example, the integration of AI tools saved time and effort in hunting for real voice talents, and the need to undergo multiple rounds of voice editing and artwork revisions.

Final remarks

As the Asia and the Pacific regions face ongoing economic and demographic shifts, including an aging population and rising informal employment, the integration of social media and other emerging technologies becomes essential for promoting inclusion across communities. This article has shown how social security organizations have successfully enhanced their outreach, engagement, and service delivery to diverse and often hard-to-reach populations. The strategic use of social media reflects the importance of adopting new communication technologies to meet the evolving needs of the public. By fostering a two-way dialogue and providing accessible information, social security organizations can build trust, enhance public participation and ultimately improve the effectiveness of their services.

Social security organizations have leveraged social media to engage in multi-modal communication mechanisms delivered through different channels. Ensuring that these channels are effective requires a strategic approach and resources, which in some cases include creative content generation methods such as benefiting from the creativity of the staff and new gamification techniques. Understanding the users remains a key element to better engage members through different channels that complement traditional and other digital communication channels. However, social security institutions need to actively manage risks associated with social media.  As noted in the ISSA Guidelines on Communication by Social Security Administrations (ISSA, 2022), they need to consider the challenges of potential misinformation and its exponential growth via social media.

The innovative use of social media can also become a strategic tool to increase the relevance of content as well as provide an engaging learning experience, demonstrated by the use of gamification. Looking ahead, it is essential for organizations to continue evolving and adapting their strategies to meet the changing needs of users in a rapidly digitalizing world. While current examples focus on customer engagement, the next wave of innovations can tap into the rich and growing source of structured and unstructured data produced by social media interactions – this is the new voice of the participant that will lead to a co-production approach to communication strategies and service delivery transformation.

References