Here's a few tips from us at Wirral CVS on how to optimise your social media usage
Know Your Audience
Understanding your target demographic and how that translates to specific social media platforms and approaches is a great way to utilise social media to serve your organisation as well as possible. Certain social media platforms are associated with specific kinds of people, for example, LinkedIn is a great platform to use if you're looking to communicate with professionals and other organisations for B2B (or rather, C2C in this case) networking.
If you're currently on all available social media, you might find some platforms are more effective than others at generating interest and engagement for your posts, this may be because the content you create is more suited to particular channels or the demographic of your organisation is more suitable for those channels. Another example is if you post a lot of pictures of what you're up to in the community, you may find you get a better response on Instagram, a platform specifically designed for posting pictures, than you do on X/Twitter which is more for statements and discussions. It might be worth thinking whether you need to be on every social channel available and consolidating your efforts into a chosen few that host your key demographics and suit your content, especially if you don't have a dedicated social media manager.
Plenty of people worry that they have to venture onto platforms like TikTok to be successful, however TikTok, despite it's capacity for virality, is not often conducive of supporting most charitable organisations with their aims and isn't designed for increasing the awareness of super-local organisations. There's many creative ways to make things like TikTok work for your organisation's digital presence and potentially increase awareness, however you shouldn't see it as a necessity.
Create Your Brand
An important aspect of having a social media page that's attractive and professional is understanding your brand. While it might seem superfluous to focus on aesthetic elements like these and for you to place more importance on the tangible work your organisation does, the age-old adage still rings true sometimes that first impressions are everything. A good Facebook page can be the difference between someone accessing your services and going unsupported, and a part of that is ensuring you have a good hi-definition logo, a cover photo and a cohesive feed that shows the benefit of what you do.
Logos are a fundamental part of having a brand, and even if you don't have any other graphic elements to your digital presence, going through the trouble of sourcing or creating a good logo is important. Think about the two or three main colours you want to implement into your logo which your brand can be built around, as the most successful brands, charitable or not, have specific colours associated with them. Take a look at a few other prominent charity's social media pages and scroll down; what are the most notable colours you see throughout their content? Do those colours align with those in their logo? Are there any visual themes and motifs that appear throughout their content? This is the essence of what branding is!
Your Organisation's Voice
Often times an organisation's voice, the way they communicate on social media, is synonymous with that of the person who is writing the posts, however sometimes this isn't the best course of action. It's good practice to think about your usage of emojis and wording with posts and whether that needs to separate from the way you type in other circumstances online. Personally, my messages to friends utilise much different language to that of operating socials for WCVS. Often times you'd be encouraged to keep your typing very formal as part of operating a business page on social media, however, with charities it can really depend on your target audience and how well you know them. Some people really prefer to interact in a less formal, more friendly way when seeking support from organisations, however others prefer to keep it formal. There's no correct answer, just different approaches!
Networking & Sharing
When operating as a charity or CIC on social media, there are many opportunities to share the content of other organisations on the Wirral to your audience and encourage networking and sharing of each other's content and events, which is one of the reasons why social media can be excellent for the sector.
However, your feed can't entirely be made up of everyone else's posts that you've shared, as not only would this not be entirely effective for people following you to easily see all the events and services you provide, but algorithmically, you'll see less of your posts reach higher engagement numbers. You typically went to be mindful about when and how often you post, giving a good amount of time (3 or 4 hours minimum) for anything you've posted to end up on people's feeds. If you post or share multiple things within the space of an hour or two, Facebook/Instagram won't put all of those posts on people's feeds, they'll randomly choose one of the multiple posts and leave out the others, meaning what could've been 100 people seeing one post is split between multiple different posts with none of them getting an ideal amount of engagement. You'd assume the more active you are at posting on social media, the better engagement figures you get, but this unfortunately isn't the case.
Analytics
Accessing and understanding your page's analytics can seem a bit daunting sometimes, but you don't have to be a data analyst to keep track of some key figures that let you know if you're doing well or not. All social media platforms will have an analytics segment that you will be able to access and see how your posts have done in terms of reach (how many people have seen it), engagement (how many people have interacted with your post in any way), reacts and shares. If you're someone who's keen on sifting through data, you may be very interested in using all this information to your advantage and getting some spreadsheets together, but typically, if this isn't you, you just want to keep track of the four metrics above and identify what content is doing well and which isn't. If you go back and identify which was your most shared, liked and clicked on post of last month, it can often come hand-in-hand with some insight as to what people want to see on your page. If this post was a picture of people at one of your organisation's activities, then this is a clear message to post more of these kinds of pictures.
It's important to realise, however, that these outlooks aren't completely definitive. Sometimes your post can do well or not solely on the basis of what day or time you post, how soon from your last post you are and sometimes just on pure luck. If there was a completely definitive guide on how to master the algorithms of social media platforms then everyone would be going viral with minimum effort, but what matters most on social media is consistency and engagement. Keep doing the things that do well on your social media platforms and you won't go far wrong.
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