This document discusses how to maximize impact through advanced social media use. It emphasizes that social media drives the internet and news cycles, so having a strong presence is critical for success. It analyzes key platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+ and provides stats on their size and how people use them. It encourages picking one platform to learn well, being consistent, treating social media as a two-way conversation, and integrating it into your work instead of thinking of it as a separate task. The document stresses enjoying social media and letting your personality come through.

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Advanced Social Media
Maximizing your impact

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Social media is not optional
 Social media drives the internet. It drives news cycles. It
seriously impacts SEO.
 Knowing how to harness the power of these platforms is critical
to success in almost any venture.
 People don’t spend a lot of time hunting for information – meet
them where they are.

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Compared with other internet users, and users of other
social networking platforms, a Facebook user who uses
the site multiple times per day is an additional two and
half times more likely to attend a political rally or
meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone on
their vote, and 43% more likely to have said they
would vote.*
*From May 2012 CIO Report.

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Facebook
 Facebook is still the largest traffic driver on the internet, simply
because everyone is on it.
 955 million people use Facebook
 2.7 Billion “Likes” every day
 250 million photos uploaded every day
 Facebook accounts for 1 in 5 of all clicks
 156 million in the US are on Facebook.

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Twitter
 500 million users – 100 million active in the US
 1 million accounts added every day
 More searches on Twitter than Yahoo! and Bing combined
 92% of users say they will retweet interesting content

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Twitter
 Breaks news faster than any other platform.
 Sounding board: Because it is so fluid, the narrative is shaped
there before it is ever written into a blog post or news article
 Media lives there. Journalists, radio hosts and producers, TV
hosts and producers, bloggers… they troll Twitter for content.
 First social media channel conservatives have dominated.

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Pinterest
 Pinterest
 First network dominated by women
 Changing the way search is done. Incredibly visual.
 Retaining and engaging users as much as two to three times as
efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in history.
 Pinterest accounts for 3.6% of referral traffic. Twitter? Only 3.61%.
 Pinterest has 10.4 million registered users (and is rapidly growing).
 Estimated unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429% from
September to Dec 2011 and 145% since the beginning of 2012.

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YouTube
 Second largest search engine behind Google.
 800,000,000 users.
 They get 4,000,000,000 page views a day. That’s 1,000,000,000,000
per year.
 Short story, people find news here. Use it.

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Google+
 Best feature: Hangouts.
 Solid platform – people aren’t using it.
 Don’t totally write it off – as long as Google+ is tied to Google
rankings, it’s still in the game.

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How bloggers influence
 Never assume that the media is already doing the work that
bloggers are doing. That is not true.
 Politicians are narcissists. They all run Google alerts on their
names. Blog hits show up in their inboxes – a handful of people
writing about an issue can have an impact, regardless of
readership.
 Public recording of a story that no one else is telling. Email
doesn’t show up in a Google search, blog posts do.

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How bloggers influence (cont.)
 Filling the gaps where the media is failing – covering things
they won’t cover. If you have an issue you can’t get the local
media to cover, start blogging about it yourself and pushing it
out there.
 Many voices are more powerful than one. Focus on building a
community of people to help push narratives and highlight truth.
 You have the ability to create your own platform now. Don’t wait
for someone else to do the work when you can do it on your
own.

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How do you do it well?
 Understand the value and invest in it.
 Treat is as a two way conversation.
Social media channels are not an RSS
feed.
 Be consistent.
 Be engaged.
 Don’t think of it as just one more thing to
do. Strong social media presence
makes your job easier!

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So what do you do with all this?
 Pick one platform. Learn it.
 Social media is most effective when fully integrated.
 Be consistent. 5 Tweets a week just isn’t enough.
 Not everyone wants to do it. That’s okay. Respect it’s power. If
you’re an organization, especially an activist organization, you
don’t really have a choice.

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Making it manageable
 TweetDeck and Hootsuite (and any other third party app) help
you organize your social media feeds.
 Put it on your phone.
 DON’T USE AUTO-FEEDS. Because they are the devil.

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Enjoy it.
 Social media is social.
 Talk to people. Let your personality come through. People like
to know who they’re talking to.
 Use a real photo.
 It’s okay to post things that aren’t political sometimes.
 Social rules apply. Say happy birthday. Congratulate people.
Encourage them.

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Q&A
Tabitha Hale
tabitha.hale@franklincenterhq.org
@tabithahale