I had the pleasure of running a couple
of group sessions at the ACOSVO Annual Conference in Edinburgh earlier this month.
Here's a Q&As on the main issues raised on the issue of how Third Sector organisations can use social media effectively.
What should we use social media for?
Different organisations and projects
use social media for different things, you have to decide what goals will help
drive your business. The Social
Charity Index should be able to give you a few
ideas from organisations already engaged with social media.
Do you need to better connect with
your client base to let them know about new and events? Do you want to have a
forum for individuals to share experiences and provide support to each
other? Have a look at Facebook and
Twitter Pages of other organisations and projects in your area of expertise or
sector and replicate good practice.
How do you get buy-in from staff?
The best approach for this is to be
open and transparent with your staff and then ask for their help.
Have a session with your team to give
them an introduction to social media tools and then ask them how they think
Twitter/Facebook etc could help them in their own work.
Be supportive of your staff, and be
upfront about your plans. You already trust your staff to speak to customers
and clients in person, on the phone, and by email, so using social media is
just another communication tool for this.
How can we measure the impact of our work through social media?
There are a number of free
tools which can help you measure the impact
of your work around social media. The ones I use most are:
Facebook’s free analytics tools for
Pages. These appear at the top of the screen which you login as a page Admin.
They tell you a range of stats, including how many likes you’ve had, how many
people have seen your page etc.
Tweetreach.com is a great free tool for Twitter. It
has a range of metrics, including how many people have seen your tweets, how
many times your tweets have appeared and which tweets and followers have
contributed most to your impact.
Should we link our social media channels together, and if so, how?
No!
Different people use Facebook and Twitter
for different things, so don’t hook up your Facebook page to automatically
update from Twitter (or vice versa). It’s OK to share content or to advertise
your Facebook content from a Tweet, but give some thought to this rather than
joining everything up.
A good rule of thumb is to update your
Facebook page a few times a week, and to Tweet a few times a day.
