Facebook and Twitter
Creating social networking pages that “march for you”
It ‘s time consuming and confusing trying to figure out how to raise your organisation’s profile and get in more funds through “the internet”. Now we have “social media” to understand too, with people asking us “Are you on facebook”?
So here are 10 tips on social networking
- Start with a strategy and a plan - Decide “why” you need to develop a web presence. Is it to communicate to a wider audience? Engage supporters? Grow a wider database of people who can volunteer? To raise more funds? To save yourself time and money? Creating pages on Facebook and Twitter can result in having “pages that march for you” raising a wider awareness in the community about your service. Write down your key objectives.
- Make a list of your resources – do you have a digital video camera? Mobile phones with cameras? A person who understands sites like Facebook and Twitter? Do you already have a website? Do you have someone who can write a weekly update on your organisation? The number and type of social media pages you may use often can depend on how resourced you are to run them.
- Type your organisation’s name into Google, write down the number of links there are. See who is linking back to you. Write this into a spreadsheet so you can check again in 2 month’s time.
- What are the key community needs that your organisation addresses? ( e.g. parenting, homelessness, mental health, budgeting, foodbank)
- Decide which sites you will use, here are some:e.g.
www.facebook.com
www.linkedin.com
www.twitter.com
www.myspace.com
www.youtube.com
www.wikispaces.com
If you have your own website www.yourname.org.nz you can create links from it to each of the other sites, and vice versa. Remember that your page is more likely to go higher in search engines like Google if you include key words in your page name, rather than using acronyms ( e.g. “www.facebook.com/MyBudgetOrganisation” will work better for you than www.facebook.com/mbo) - Set up your Facebook or Twitter page. You will find that you can link them to each other. If you upload a video to your youtube page, you can link to it from your Twitter and Facebook page. You can also link your mobile phone to your pages, so that you can write a text and it will appear on both pages.
- A tip on using the combination of Twitter and Facebook – you can write a more magazine style article into Facebook, but the link on Twitter carries the name of the article along with the link ( using www.tinyurl.com will reduce it down). So effectively Twitter can act as a signpost back to both your Facebook and main website pages.
- Now grow a group of followers. Send the link by email to your existing supporters, asking them to add themselves. Type into the Facebook search the name of your own town and see what other groups and people have pages on Facebook that you can link yours to.
- Each week, add content about what’s happening, what your organisation is doing, this will help to steadily increase the numbers of people following the page. You can also add photos and events.
- Writing a social media policy is helpful for staff to understand the importance of ensuring your organisational brand is perceived as it should be.
Facebook provides statistics showing you how many people have joined, where they are from and tracks this information over time.
Written by Rosalie Crawford, columnist, web editor and author of the Whanau ora Supporters Facebook / Twitter pages as well as other pages on Facebook e.g. for single parenting, new migrants, parenting and Rotorua.
Contact: Rosalie.crawford@xtra.co.nz or follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RosalieCrawford ]