How often do you find yourself taking your phone out of your pocket or picking-up your tablet and having a quick swipe down your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social media feed?
Chances are that many of your members do exactly the same thing. Which makes it all the more important that you are aware of how to effectively use social media to connect with them.
Some of the more recent campaigns we’ve launched at the Alliance, including the Mental Health Charter and Get Your Kit On, have relied heavily on social media to build awareness and generate engagement amongst our members and across the wider sector.
For each campaign, we identified which particular channel could provide the best possible engagement based on what our desired outcomes were.
For the Charter, we designed some shareable messages that our members and supporters could share on Twitter, encouraging people to re-tweet and drive traffic towards our website. Here the aim was to raise awareness and increase Charter sign-ups.
For the Get Your Kit On campaign, we wanted to drive people to send a message to the Treasury via a microsite, while also getting them to share their own content to keep the campaign prominent. To do this, we set-up a dedicated Facebook page to allow people to upload and share their photos of them “getting their kit on”.
Which leads me on to the next point of using social media to engage with your membership. Knowing what kind of content works best for each channel is just as important as understanding which channel to use.
Creating shareable content such as infographics or images will help to ensure your message is highly visible . Short video clips and insights can also encourage people to spend a bit more time on your channels and therefore, be more likely to visit your website or make an enquiry as a result.
As you can see, there is more to using social media than a “share and they will come” philosophy. To find out more about how to do it well, I’d highly recommend you come to our social media workshop.
This workshop is part of Alliance Learning Week, a week of events aimed at helping our members develop their skills on topics like digital media, HR and Board matters. To find out more about Alliance Learning Week, click here.
