By Guest Blogger Paul Wilson of PR Wilson Media – So you want to use social media? Where do you start?
How do you go about promoting your projects to other potential fundraisers and donors?
With limited time and resources, what’s the best way to spread the word?
As The Good Exchange team will tell you, the best performing fundraising projects on The Good Exchange platform are consistently those that have a strong online web and social media presence.
At the same time, we fully appreciate that so many of our users feel overwhelmed at the prospect of promoting via social media. They tell us that they just don’t have a clear understanding of how to use these powerful channels effectively. Let’s face it, none of this stuff comes with an instruction manual.
So at this point if you are thinking of just taking the plunge and setting up social media accounts on the main platforms, it’s worth taking a few minutes to plan and prepare!
Even if you already have active and established social media accounts, it’s well worth stepping through the process from the planning stage onwards. Follow this simple, field proven 6 step blueprint for sustainable Social Media Marketing success.
The steps are Plan, Listen, Prepare, Build, Engage and Measure.
All 6 stages are important and require focussed attention.
- Plan – identify your target audience and their individual personas (a persona is a semi-fictional outline of the ideal individual that you want to reach. For example, where are they based? How do they behave? What motivates them? What’s the best way online social media platform to use to reach them? Set some goals for what you want to achieve e.g. number of Tweets, posts etc, number of new followers, amount of activity (Retweets/Likes etc)
- Listen – find out what’s already being said out there in the market place – do a bit of Google searching to see what they biggest talking points are, look at charities and community groups like yours, find out what influencers, potential partners and competitors in your sector are saying and doing on-line
- Prepare – choose your social media app(s), set up your accounts and complete your profiles and check over any existing social media presence – do the right people have admin rights or do you need to change things? Are the right messages being given out or do you need a refresh and re-training?
- Build – proactively find and connect (follow/like/retweet/comment etc) with the people and groups who share common interests with your organisation (see Plan and Listen above), so you develop an audience that is relevant to you
- Engage – is all about the quality of the content and the ways in which you message out there in the most effective way possible e.g. by telling stories, using images, videos, news stories, onward links etc
- Measure – track the results of your social media marketing against the goals that you set objectives. All the major tools have comprehensive and easy-to-use analytics tools that you can use for free
Follow this link to hear our Social Media expert, Paul Wilson of PR Wilson Media, go through the 6 step model in person.
