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Social Media by Ryan Clark

This article is derived from the fourth presentation by Ryan Clark

Social media is a ubiquitous form of communication in today’s world. Your volunteers use it. Your employees use it. Your donors use it, and hopefully you do too. With the breadth of ways to get the word out, we need to take a step back first and talk about social media strategy, then the specific ways to carry out your specific goals.

Social media is an ever-changing landscape, with new services popping up everyday. With the mediums constantly changing, a strategy helps you to stay on route towards your goal.

Social media has many practical purposes:

• Increase visibility
• Create dialogue with people interested in your cause
• Generate buzz about campaigns and events
• Reinforce your brand as one that is relevant, purposeful, and open

Social media and email have a broad reach, but they must be focused and targeted in order to be effective. And in order to focus your social media communications you must first figure out the type of conversation you want to have, who you want to have it with,  where you want that conversation to take place, and how frequently it will happen.

The Audience of the Conversation

The key to any conversation is the audience. And the better you know your audience, the more effectively you can communicate with them.

Try to personify your audience by thinking of a couple main users:

• How old are they?
• What type of occupation do they have?
• How much time do they spend online?
• Where do they live?
• Most Important: How do they consume media?

These user cases can help you to make targeted decisions about how to get all your information out there.

The Depth of Conversation

One-sided versus two-sided conversations: Is your method of social media going to be like an organization’s bulletin board or water cooler?

Time Investment – Running and managing an online discussion is a very time-consuming task. You have to seriously consider your ability to mediate discussions, keep them on point, alleviate concerns, and respond QUICKLY. People are likely to view an unanswered concern as one that is being side-stepped or ignored. Be sure that you want to have an open discussion before inviting open interaction! Something to remember is that one-way conversations are much easier because they require less time and attention to maintain.

Content – One-sided conversations must be rich in consumable content, or you may risk boring subscribers. Keep content flowing in a regular stream, with small bits daily or weekly. Faithful followers want to feel like they are a part of something even if they can’t experience it first hand, so post pictures of events, news about upcoming activities, or follow-ups from recently finished campaigns. Be sure to feed followers in a variety of ways, like the food groups. Also, try to keep content on topic. If you are a non-profit dealing with homelessness, give info about homelessness, not what you had for breakfast. Straying from your main vision may lead you to alienate followers who don’t agree with you.

Two-sided conversations should follow the same basic principles, and have the added benefit of allowing people to respond to you on a personal level.

The Frequency of Conversation

After judging the types of people you want to communicate with, you can decide how often you want to engage in Social Media. This really is totally up to you as an organization, based on your familiarity with the mediums and available time.

It also depends on the people consuming the media and their internet-attention-span. Post too much and you can risk over-exposure, and resulting disinterest. Post too little, and risk underexposure, and no interest to begin with. To an extent, the medium can help determine the frequency, but there should always be a strategy behind it.

The Method of Conversation

Now that you know what type of conversation you want to have, who you want to have it with, and how frequently you want to have it, we can explore how to actually integrate your Social Media Strategy into your organization.

The Low Hanging Fruit
There are basically 3 main ways to get the word out to your audience.

Twitter

• Microblogging – 140 characters or less
• Newest on the scene
• Great for quick, frequent updates (one way conversation)
• Harder for meaningful dialogue because of character count
• Good for seeing what other people are saying about you
• Large user-base
• Easy to pull into a website (reuse)
• Easy to add pictures and links to media or webpages
• Integrated into phones
• Audience is more tech-savvy, cutting edge

Facebook

• Social connections
• Most robust social network
• Great for either type of conversation: dialogue or post
• Handles discussion, media, and event info
• Requires greater amount of care and mediation
• Largest user base
• Hard to integrate into existing website
• Audience is incredibly broad
• Posts feed to twitter (vise versa)

Email specifically RSS based-email campaigns

• Easy to set up
• Easy to track with real data
• Reuses previously generated content
• Requires no mediation
• Huge audience
• Quick to consume

To conclude, there are several questions you need to ask yourself before your organization uses social media. One thing is for certain, though: When used correctly, social media can be a huge asset to your marketing efforts.