Sort out your charity, co-op or social enterprise social media once and for all
How are we all feeling as we settle back into the (home?) office routine? Rested, ready to make 2023 the best year yet for your social media?
A new year, a new start - it represents so much possibility doesn’t it? And this time of year is filled with overblown promises of magical new lives and businesses if we only adopt ‘one simple trick’. But the reality for most of is that no matter how grand our plans for change, the day to day remains much the same - it’s much easier to have a lofty goal than it is to change years of habitual working practice.
No matter how much we want it, there isn’t one simple trick to sorting out your social media (or anything else!). If it sounds too good to be true it usually is. But I genuinely do believe that there are some simple, practical steps that any organisation can take to genuinely sort out their social media, be posting week in week out, and engaging event day - in not more than about 2 hours a week. It takes organisation and method - but it’s possible. Honest.
There are four things we advise clients to do which make a world of difference. These are things we do in our work for clients, every week - they are the foundations of our work. Here we go!
Decide now what content you want to share, where you will find it, and set up simple processes to get it
When we start work with a new client we tend to start with a mix of evergreen content (stuff that’s always true about your organisation, that’s on your website - we wrote about it here), news from a handful of websites that are relevant to you and your audience (eg if you’re a domestic abuse charity, you might want to check Women’s Aid, Refuge and The Women’s Budget Group) and we recommend setting up Google Alerts that are relevant (using the example above we might set up alerts for Legislation Domestic Violence, and VAWG for example). So the tasks here would be - Create a bookmarks folder of websites to check, including your own organisation’s blog and events calendar. Set up Google alerts for relevant terms. Set up a folder in your inbox to pop all the Google alerts into when they arrive so you’re not overwhelmed. You could maybe put good newsletters and those ‘can we share this on social media’ emails in there too. Note - you are finding stuff to share on social media NOT creating stuff to share on social media. Creating brand new stuff is the bit a lot of people find intimidating so we start by avoiding that bit entirely.
Decide now on a bare minimum social posting schedule for each platform that you want to be present on.
This could be 2x a day on Twitter, 2x a week on FB, 2x a week on Instagram with 3x stories a week, and 1x a week on Linked In. That would be 19 posts a week and you’d be consistently present across all platforms. It genuinely is better to do little but often - and consistently - than it is to have one huge day of posting every six months when you have the energy and inspiration and be silent in between. Map this out on a bit of paper, or in your diary, or set up schedules in a scheduling tool. We use Buffer and love it.
As a note - we tend to schedule a week of content at a time, but we try to schedule the next week while we still have two days of content to go. So if you do your scheduling on a Tuesday, we’d recommend scheduling for the period Friday to Thursday. It helps on those days when things explode and you HAVE to change your plans.
Set aside time once a week to write and schedule content
Set up a recurring appointment in your diary to create social media posts and commit to ring-fencing this time. Then, when that time rolls around each week, you open up all the bookmarked pages, see if there’s anything new to share, check all your Google Alerts and newsletters, and write the posts for everything you find for each platform. Remember - you can have a few posts a week about the same thing on Twitter - so even though you’re looking for 14 posts, you might write three each, with different wording, about two news stories, three about an upcoming event, four evergreen and one could be a Happy Friday gif - just spread them out through the week. We tend to write for Twitter first as it has the shortest character count, and then add more detail for other platforms. If you are using a paid for scheduling tool you can do this inside the tool and some will automatically duplicate the posts for other platforms for you. If you are using free social media scheduling products (you can schedule posts for Twitter inside Twitter and for Facebook and Instagram, inside Facebook Business Manager - we’ll write more about this soon) you will need to copy and paste. Sadly, you can’t schedule to Linked In without a paid tool - or at least we haven’t found a way to. If you find a way let us know!
Decide now who has capacity to monitor your social accounts and when that will be done.
We would recommend checking every platform at least once a day. We check at least three times, and often more, so if someone is shouting at us, we pick it up at the most within half a working day. Make it be a specific part of a routine to look at all your accounts and respond to any people chatting to you. It can literally take five minutes once a day and I promise you it matters!
If you can implement these four steps in January, make them part of your routine and and stick to them, I give you my word that you will make a world of difference to the social media content you produce. You will feel calmer, less stressed, you will never run out of content - and what that means i syou will start to find moments of inspiration and add extra stuff on top. This is just the beginning of sorting our social media for your charity, social enterprise or women’s organisation - promise!
As ever - I know you can do this but if you want some help or to chat, get in touch. Book a free 30 minute social media Q&A here