I was invited to talk to the Rotary Club of Lyme Regis, Dorset on 20th August 29015 about the benefits and disadvantages of using social media to promote events/fundraising activities.
2. What is social media?
‘Websites and applications that
enable users to create and share
content or to participate in social
networking.’
Oxford Dictionaries
3. What is social media?
‘Websites and applications that
enable users to create and share
content or to participate in social
networking.’
•Oxford Dictionaries
Introductions.
Trying to keep it simple (Bee’s instruction.). Please tell me if I’m telling you stuff you already know.
Create content
Share information
Connect with people through virtual communities
Various types of social media including...
Websites like wikipedia have revolutionised the internet, and are the epitome of social media agenda.
Central site that anyone can edit. Emphasis on create and share.
Encyclopedia is co-created by users across the globe, sharing their knowledge and expertise on a variety of subjects.
Blogs - like Rotary Voices
Essentially a self-publishing mechanism that can be used for news, reviews, opinion pieces, recipes (a lot of this years Great British Bake Off contestants are being criticised for being semi-pro as they are food bloggers...).
Organisations and individuals have blogs.
Emphasis again on create and share.
Multiple platforms you can use - blogger, wordpress, blogspot, tumblr...
Social bookmarking is like a bigger version of your bookmarks bar on your web browser
‘bookmark’ content from all over the web - Pinterest you ‘pin’ it (different terminology, but means the same thing) on to ‘boards’ which are individual pages focused on a particular theme/topic
Instagram - a network like facebook where you ‘follow’ individuals or companies who share photos or short videos with captions. Visual rather than text based. Promotes bad photography as you can put a filter on a bad photo and make it look slightly better.
Most popular social networking tool with over 1 billion users worldwide.
Profiles - an individual, whom people can add as ‘friends’. Includes photo, basic information (age, where you live, job, relationship status, where you went to school...the amount of information you can but on your profile is prolific).
Receive updates from your friends (what they had for breakfast usually).
Groups - for small communities like clubs to communicate (am dram, PTFAs)
.
Pages - typically organisations or companies that people can ‘like’ and receive updates from (news, products etc. for instance I ‘like’ local theatres and use these to receive programme information) - best for Rotary
Two forms of content..
Anything posted by your friends, in groups you are part of or by pages you like appears in your News feed
Emphasis on sharing and social networking, staying ‘connected’.
Profile page or group has an individual timeline
Newsfeed = what everybody else posts
Timeline = everything you’ve posted
Talk through components briefly
Need a ‘profile’ to set up a ‘page’
You can allow or disable posts to your page
Microblogging site
500 million users in comparison to twitter
Users send and read 140 character messages called ‘tweets’
Difference? Often said that Facebook is for connecting with the people you went to school with, and twitter is for the people you wish you’d gone to school with
Talk through hastag and mention
Link to picture on instsgram
Reply button
RT button
Favourite button
... = more options
Be Active/Post often - use social media to give your followers an insight in to what your organisation does. Promote events, fundraisers, meetings, talks...Spend 20 mins each day looking at it.
On both twitter and facebook you can ‘schedule posts’ to appear at some point in the future
Talk back - they are called social media and social networks for a reason. On FB respond to wall posts, comments, direct messages. On Twitter, respond to tweets you are mentioned in and direct messages.
Actively try and engage your followers - don’t just expect interaction.
People are more visually oriented. Make sure you have profile and header images - leaving it blank is disengaging.
Make sure you have an much information on your page/profile as possible, and keep it up to date. Nothing worse than out of date weblinks, names and contact details.
Lyme Lunge
Carols Round the Tree
Beer Festival organisers - no money spent on advertising, no door-to-door flyering. All on social media. Biggest turn out ever.
Abuse, bad reviews, spam
Time commitment - needs to be updated daily and kept ‘alive’, but multiple people can access and post/tweet from the same account, can schedule tweets in advance and link Facebook and Twitter, so whatever you post on one is posted on the other
Enables the spread of false information
Lost productivity
Don’t control what is online - but you don’t control world of mouth either (online is just more permanent)
Difficult to measure impact - FB has ‘insights’ and Twitter has ‘analytics’ about traffic, number of retweets etc. but they don’t tell you how it corresponds to sales, or attendance at events. Hubspot say you should measure success not in number of followers but quality of engagement. Reality - if you get retweeted to 40,000 followers, thats a big plug for your organisation. Can that be a bad thing?
Although you may not like it, and it has its pitfalls, social media is where most people get their information.
Use FB and Twitter to share events, fundraisers, meetings, talks...
Not really talked about them, but something to think about...
Use a blog to share more detailed stories of projects you have supported/funded etc. Post content that goes out in your news letter on there. Get the people you are supporting to write blog posts for you.
Setting up a blog is very simple, and the majority of blogging platforms do all the hard work for you. Then it is a case of writing content (always in word where you can save it!) and copy and paste it in to a box.
Happily provide advice and support in doing this.