How Facebook Reached 2 Million External Learners in 34 Months

Facebook introduced the Blueprint e-learning platform for marketers in March 2015. 34 months later they celebrated 2 million users. Here’s how.

Facebook knows that the digital marketing space is highly competitive and evolves very quickly. So the company created Blueprint to teach advertisers, marketers and business professionals how to get the most out of the Facebook marketing platforms.

Facebook also knows that engaging this kind of external audience requires two things - great content and learning software that delivers an exceptional user experience.

So, why did Facebook choose to develop Blueprint with Intellum? It was a natural evolution of an already successful partnership.

“Intellum had been our internal, employee-facing learning management partner for years. When we were ready to develop a program to provide free eLearning to customers at a global scale, Intellum readily adjusted, creating the external learning environment now known as Blueprint,” says Amy Brooks, Head of Partner Training & Certification at Facebook.

Combining Intellum’s seventeen years of learning delivery experience with Facebook’s social media and human behavior expertise, the two companies worked very closely to build an engaging, scalable solution that would grab and keep the attention of the external learner. Speed and flexibility were critical components of this project and as the team neared completion, Facebook uncovered an unexpected challenge. “Three days before the launch, we identified some critical requirements that forced us to maneuver fairly aggressively. Intellum met those needs to ensure that we launched on time, as planned.” says Brooks.

Today, Intellum and Facebook Blueprint are setting the standard for external audience engagement.

Engagement By The Numbers

Managing more than two million external users in a single environment requires an uncommon partnership. Together, Facebook and Intellum have created a learning environment that evolves as quickly as Facebook does, thanks largely to Intellum’s extremely flexible approach to learning technology.

“Intellum has supported not only a growth in size and scale but also complexity – Blueprint now offers a wide variety of content included recorded webinars and customized learning paths,” says Brooks

Top 5 Countries Using Blueprint

#1 United States

#2 India

#3 Brazil

#4 Mexico

#5 South Korea

Delivering a truly global user experience requires powerful localization capabilities. Intellum allows Facebook to segment the audience by geographic location, customizing the login experience by region. The Intellum Platform is translated into 16 different languages out of the box, and Facebook currently offers Blueprint in: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Turkish.

How Engagement Actually Works

Facebook's commitment to creating alluring content plays a huge role in the success of the Blueprint project. Partnering with several creative agencies, Facebook builds the kind of engaging learning experiences that keep learners coming back for more.

There is also a direct correlation between consistently adding content to the learning environment and improving the level of user engagement. As Facebook constantly adds new learning assets, engagement (defined here as self enrollments) hockey sticks and remains high.

The ability to easily add content in the Intellum Platform helps Facebook grow. “Intellum has continued to support Blueprint in its growth from just 35 eLearning courses in English to over 90 comprehensive courses in 13 languages deployed globally,” says Brooks.