“We decided to use the new media to promote our campaign this year. Those seeking to perform Haj used our social networking pages to learn about Haj, conduct and rituals,” he said. “Through the social networking sites we could reach a large number of users and were able to send cautionary messages plus providing them with the latest reports about Haj this year,” he added.

According to Al-Khudairi, about 36,200 members joined the campaign page on the Facebook during one month. He added, the campaign fan page was “liked” by many users from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Britain, Jordan and Algeria. People from various ages — from 25 to 44 — had joined the campaign page on the Facebook.

Al-Khudairi stressed that such social networking sites facilitated the campaign. He also indicated that a large number of users preferred to follow the information on Twitter.

“About 2,117 followers on Twitter had joined our page and re-tweeted the published information on the link twitter.com/#/hajjcamp. The YouTube link of our campaign had 1,741 viewers. The link was Youtube.com/hajjcampaign,” he said.

On Google, there are about 100,000 users trying to find news about the campaign. He said that Google search would open 200 pages when the theme “Haj is worship and Civil Behavior” was searched.Al-Khudairi confirmed that they used a mix of the traditional media tools and new media to communicate with the hope to reaching the largest segment of the society.

The campaign’s aim is to send cautionary messages to the society whether through traditional media such as newspapers and television or through social media. “Our staff is working 24 hours on both the media tools to fulfill pilgrims’ needs,” Al-Khudairi added.