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<\/a><\/div>Related article: How to use your brand to achieve your goals<\/strong><\/a><\/p> Some questions to ask when thinking through your strategy are, ‘Why do I want to be on social media?’ and ‘What am I looking to achieve?’. Like any other programme, you need to have a set of clear goals and objectives for social media. Not only will this allow you to cater what you put out, but without it, you run the risk of not achieving anything concrete.<\/p> For example, if your goal is to make your brand more visible, you might ask people to share and interact with your posts. If, on the other hand, you want to drive traffic to your website, you would need content that drives link clicks.<\/p> When setting goals, a helpful guide to follow is checking to see if they are ‘SMART’<\/a>, ie, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time specific. Here are some examples of SMART goals:<\/p> Social media platforms cater to different demographics of people, each of which responds to certain types of content. Even though the work you do may be relevant to more than one demographic, it is necessary to know who each post\/each platform is engaging with, so that you can cater your content accordingly. This way you know you are talking to one stakeholder effectively, and if others get engaged too, that’s an added bonus.<\/p> For example, consider the variety of people we at IDR talk to across our platforms—<\/span>on Facebook our audience is primarily above 30 years old and living in Tier II cities; on Instagram it’s people between 20-35 years of age who are interested in content that is funny or speaks to their political\/ideological views, on Twitter it’s an Indian and global network of social-impact professionals, and on LinkedIn it’s a mix of sector experts and the middle-management rung of professionals.<\/p> Social media can be a time-consuming activity, especially if you are present on multiple platforms. Apart from building out a strategy and taking care of daily posting, you need to invest time in monitoring and responding to comments, building a community, and looking at your analytics.<\/p> If you have limited time and resources to spend on social media, do not spread yourself thin by building a presence on multiple different platforms.<\/p><\/blockquote> It is import to note here though that different platforms require<\/a> different amounts of time investment. For example, while three posts a week on Facebook might be sufficient, a platform like Twitter needs three posts a day or more. On the other hand, a tweet can be significantly less time consuming to make, than a Facebook post.<\/p> So, if you have limited time and resources to spend on social media, do not spread yourself thin by building a presence on multiple different platforms. It is better to excel on one or two platforms, rather than having four to five inactive accounts across different platforms.<\/p> Here are a few things to consider when thinking about the resources you have:<\/p> \n With a strategy that takes into account your availability of resources, social media can actually be used to help your organisation meet its overall goals. | Picture courtesy: Pixabay<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p> As you are creating content, it is important to understand what resonates with audiences most on social media. A recent study<\/a> found that people interacted most with content that was entertaining, inspirational, and educational. Once you do this, think about what voice you want your brand to have online, and then decide what kind of tone your content will take.<\/p> User generated content is one of the easiest and most effective ways to source content.<\/p><\/blockquote> Next you can think about the medium your content will be in. Will it be photographs, graphics, articles, or videos? Remember, different platforms were built for different formats. For example, articles do very well on LinkedIn, images on Instagram, news on Twitter, and so on.<\/p> Another thing to think about is whether you have enough content to post regularly. If not, think about where you can get that from. One good strategy to follow here is to explore ‘properties’ you can build out, which can be created in advance. For example, at IDR we have a bank of quotes, statistics, and similar posts that are made and stored for future use. To get started, you could think about: Quotes from community members, fun facts about the organisation, photo stories about field visits, and so on.<\/p> Remember, you do not have to create all the content you post on social media yourself. User generated content<\/a> is one of the easiest and most effective ways to source content. This could be in the form of testimonials from donors, photos from community members, or asking experts from the field to send in educational videos on specific topics.<\/p> From the day you start, you need to constantly track your social media efforts to make sure you are meeting the goals you had set. Once you have an idea of what works and what doesn’t work with your audience, you can adjust your content strategy to help you attain your goals more efficiently.<\/p> Here are some key metrics that people usually track:<\/p> Related article: Building your website 101<\/strong><\/a><\/p> Here are some social media best practices to keep in mind:<\/p> Here are some helpful tools you can explore:<\/p> —<\/p>\n
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