Save YOUR charity or business time on social media this year

Hello everyone and happy new year!

Like you, we’re hoping it’ll be a good, healthy, with real life people, one!

Today is, for many, the 12th day of Christmas and as we were off on actual Christmas day (and we hope you were too), we are going to take this opportunity to give you a lovely present 🎁

Do you want to do more on social media, but can’t find the time? Want to promote your charity or business services, but just can’t reliably post every day? Read on, friend…

When we run social media training, the one things that lights everyone up is the idea of something called Evergreen Content - content you can write once, and use again and again and again.

It’s not the most exciting content in the world but it can be a really strong foundation to sit more exciting stuff on top of. And it can be a great first step.

The secret to success on social media is consistency. It’s better to post once a day every day than ten times in once day and nothing for the rest of the week. So what do you say…?

If you think about it, there is stuff about your organisation that will always* be true - information about you, what you do, your opening hours, what you have done, how people can contact you to get help or access your services. And this is probably right there, on your website, already.

Go and have a look at your organisation website now. It’s probably got pages headed something like ‘About Us’ Services’ ‘Contact Us’ and maybe ‘Support Us’ or ‘Shop Online’.

Can you find two, three - five bits of information on each page that you could turn into a tweet, or facebook post? Let’s say your opening hours at 9-5.30 Monday to Friday. You could write ‘Every Monday to Friday, from 9.30 to 5.30 we’re here to take your calls and support you’ or ‘We’re here every weekday, Monday to Friday, from 9 to 5.30, providing you with the best wholefoods around’. Your website almost writes your evergreen content for you.

There are LOTS of tools out there that can help you store, organise and post this but if you’ve not got the £££ or the confidence to use them, you can use a basic two column spreadsheet to store your evergreen content - here’s a template we’ve made for you to look at. Can you see how it works - and how once you’ve got one version of something it’s really easy to come up with two - or three? Different versions matter as no-one wants to feel a computer is talking to them.

Go back to your website - how much evergreen content could you create, in an hour next week?

Once you’ve got this bank of content you could use a free tool to schedule your posts (more on that next week) - or if you’re not ready for that yet, you could just set an alarm in your phone for the same time every day and copy and paste a post then. Or ask someone else to do it.

Investing a few hours into writing a big bank of Evergreen Content means you can be creative once, for a good long while, but don’t have to be creative when you’re busy - you can just post soemthing you know works, regularly and reliably.

Of course - we wouldn’t be doing this right if we didn’t tell you we can do this for you. Of course we can - and do give us a shout if you’d like to discuss it - but what we’re really all about is capacity building and helping small organisations get heard. You can do this, we know you can!

*or almost always as there are almost always exceptions to every rule