Social Media for Associations: 4 Factors to Succeed
Is your association stuck on deciding whether it’s time to embrace social media?
You don’t have to look any further than the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge or the AARP Take a Stand campaign to see why social media is the real deal when it comes to building awareness, driving engagement and accomplishing strategic goals.
But also consider this: nearly 80 percent of Americans are on social media, and the worldwide number of users is expected to be 2.95 billion by 2020. An audience awaits your association’s message!
With several options, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, deciding where to start might seem daunting. Even if your association is already using social media, is your staff being strategic and seeing the results they want?
Consider these four factors to get started and ramp up your engagement.
1. What do you want to accomplish?
First and foremost, associations should be using social media with purpose. How does social media as a form of digital communication fit into your larger communications strategy? Fundraising, promoting registration for an event or live webcast, announcing a new appointment or partnership, and sharing specialized expertise — these are just some of the reasons why associations use social media. Campaigns can be long or short-term, but each and every post on social media should have a call to action. What is your association asking followers to do and why?
2. Pay attention to timing, frequency, and content
Without a doubt, images — properly edited, formatted and shared to social media — get attention. But is that all you should post? How about videos, polls or blog posts? Audiences crave interesting, aesthetically pleasing and engaging content, and as long as your association has fresh material, it should be shared. The possibilities are endless, and associations should experiment with different types of posts — try different tones, such as including humor and serious posts. Over time, through analytics, you should come to understand what your audience finds interesting.
Ultimately though, whether it’s a weekly meeting or online document, associations should think about how staff can generate ideas for content and create a monthly schedule that lets everyone know what will be posted, when and by who.
Associations should also be aware of how existing visual identity can help build a social media brand that reinforces organization-wide objectives and communications goals. A simple example is to use color schemes and font-types that reflect your website design on any social media images.
Perhaps most importantly, and certainly when it comes to building a content schedule around certain posts, associations need to be measuring how their posts are performing — are posts popular in the morning, afternoon or evening of weekends or weekdays? By popular, we mean are they driving traffic and leading to the conversions you want to see take place on your website. Associations should also be asking how many times a day they should post content. Media platforms include analytics tools that help social media staff find these answers. It’s critical that associations train and empower staff to become the experts needed to help these social media accounts flourish.
3. Tweet, post, share: are all platforms equal?
To successfully use social media, associations need to deliver the right content to the right audience through the right channel. If you’re wondering whether you should focus on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, the truth is you should be focusing on all platforms. But you should be aware that your LinkedIn followers, given the platform’s purpose to connect professionals, will differ from your Facebook followers — and individuals will use each platform at different times during the day. Your social media strategy and posts should reflect these differences. Cross-promoting content on multiple channels can be highly effective, but can also frustrate an audience if they’re seeing the exact same image and words more than once and in more than one place. Associations should find unique ways to promote the same content. Doing so also addresses the fact that not all platforms are suitable for the same type of post — Twitter, for example, won’t allow you to post over a certain character limit. Be strategic and clever about how you’re sharing content in more than one place.
4. Social media is community driven
Associations should not be afraid to engage directly with their social media followers. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are designed to encourage dialogue and two-way communication, which ultimately leads to a captivated audience, as well as relationship and community building. In addition to posting content, associations should find their digital voice and embrace the opportunity to engage with the public. This can include starting discussions on relevant topics, providing answers to questions, moderating live webcasts, or connecting members with each other. Doing so will help associations get the most out of their online social media presence.
