Enchanting Your Audience
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
2 likes•524 views
ConnectVA 2013 Social Media for Nonprofits Conference breakout session on Enchanting Your Audience with Emily Shane of The Hodges Partnership. A discussion on effective content management across various social channels, this session will cover identifying storylines within your organization, developing content bins, best practices for creating engaging content and process recommendations for extracting this information -- all with the goal of extending organizational missions and raising brand awareness.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (12)
More from ConnectVA
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Enchanting Your Audience
- 1. Enchanting Your Audience A discussion on discovering your social story and how to tell it without pulling your hair out.
- 2. What makes good content? • Meaningful to your audience – Educate – Inform – Makes them feel good • Engaging – Engage with you – Engage with their community
- 3. What’s right for your organization? • What do you hope to convey? – Expertise – Sell – Brand personality – Ambassador Mobilizer • Who is the intended audience? • Are there regulatory restrictions? • What is the internal approval process?
- 4. Content Bins • Organizational News • Executive Leadership • Brand – Key Differentiator – Your Process – An element of your brand that is central to who you are • Expertise • Partnerships and Marketing
- 5. Content Bins • • • • Holiday/Calendar Fun Facts & Stats Contests Curation – Industry News and Trends – Publications – Thought Leaders
- 7. Getting the Content • • • • Content Bin Doc Email Buddy/Departmental Point Person Traffic Meetings Shared Responsibility
- 8. What Content and Where? Platform Attributes Facebook Largest consumer social platform. Business friendly. Good analytics. Strong advertising platform. Twitter Large, very active user-base. Great for breaking news. Fastest growing demographic is 55-64. Pinterest Fastest growing platform for content sharing . Great if your organization is visual or access to photography (weekly). YouTube Video sharing website. Reaches more people between 18-34 than any cable network. Great Facebook ,Twitter, LinkedIn and blog add on. Instagram Photo sharing tool. One of the fastest growing platforms. Great Facebook, LinkedIn, Blog or Twitter add on. LinkedIn Largest professional social platform. Great for B2B audience. Newly launched advertising capabilities with ability to reach niche audiences. Blog Company-controlled social platform capable of long-format content. Great content hub for Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn add on.
- 9. Post Frequency Platform Minimum Maximum Facebook 4 per week 7 per week Twitter 2 per day n/a Pinterest 2 per week n/a YouTube 1 per week n/a Instagram n/a n/a LinkedIn 1 per week 7 per week Blog 2 per month 3 per week
- 10. Posts Across Platforms • Demographic Differences • Its OK to repeat content, just don’t copy and paste. • Use platform specific tools
- 11. Developing Posts Encourage virality – Questions: Want a response? Ask open-ended questions. – Visuals: Include a photo or video in updates to make it more visual. – Promote action: Ask users to take an action with your post. Telling users specifically what you want makes them more likely to take the course of action. They don’t know unless you tell them.
- 13. Best Practices • Share editorial calendar with executive team 4 weeks prior to launch • 2-3 weeks of good content before you drive new audiences (through email, other social platforms or advertising) • Update profile information quarterly • Monitor 2-3 times daily • Blog hosting
- 14. Questions? Want a template? Email me. Emily@hodgespart.com http://hodgespart.com/gong/
Editor's Notes
- We’re all here because we understand the importance of maintaining a social profile and the burden that comes along with that. Whether you’re interested in starting a new social profile,managing an existing community or adding additional platforms, your success is contingent upon the content you’re able to produce. You can have a good idea and fail in the execution. And likewise, you can have great execution, but your content just isn’t that interesting. Today’s goal is to talk about what makes good content and discuss proven methods and a process for collecting that content from within your organization.
- There’s no clear definition for what good content is. And as you can guess, it was a little challenging trying to come up with content ideas for such a broad audience. Content is organization specific. Having said that, I think there are a few general statements we can make about good content. Broadly speaking good content touches a nerve. It educates the reader about the world around them. It provides them with easy access to information about your organization, which they’ve self selected as people who are intersected in learning more – by liking, following, subscribing.It makes them laugh, cry, contribute – it evokes emotion, entertains. From a social perspective, good content should make the user want to engage with you – retweeting, commenting, liking.It should also encourage, and when appropriate incentivize, users to share your message with their broader community
- So how to do you find good content from within your organization?Typically at Hodges, we start with a simple survey. The purposes of the survey is to help us understand your broader goals. We start by looking at your overall message. Are you trying to position yourself as an expert? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website and sell product (or solicit donations)? Is your social profile solely intended to create awareness for your organization or are you hoping to develop a network and use your social constituents as brand ambassadors who spread your word through their social networks? Is it a mix of these?Once we understand the priority of your goals, we try and understand your intended audience (donors, prospective donors, volunteers, board members, sister agencies) and what content might be relevant for them. We try to consider any regulatory bodies that may restrict content. This could be the national or international arm of your organization (which may have rules associated with social media practices). We typically deal with this with our financial and legal clients. Lastly, knowing what you do about your organization, what might the content approval process look like? Will there be several levels that might prevent you from covering time sensitive info? Its not a deal breaker, but if that’s the case, you’ll need to look to think about that when you’re selecting platforms and create content that’s more evergreen.
- Once you understand your audience and tone, the next steps is to looking at your organization and determine the various content bins or categories you could speak to. By entering into the social media sphere, you’ve become your own content producer. You’re no longer solely reliant on outside media to share your content. You are your own publication and broadcast outlet. Similar to a media outlet, you want to create different “sections” that will provide you with varied content. For instance, the RTD reports on National and International news, local news, business news, entertainment, sports, etc. Your content bins will function in a similar way. They will help you report on a variety of aspects from within your organization. It will also help you share the burden of content development throughout your organization. Trust me, if you farm some of that stuff out, you’ll still have plenty of responsibility managing the overall effort and holding your organization accountable. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve come up with a variety of potential content sources that could be applied broadly. You know your organization better than I do, so by no means is this list comprehensive, but it should be a good starting point.So this first slide lists what I would characterize as internal content bins. This is content that comes from within your organization. Organizational news – press releases, news coverage, service offerings.Executive leadership – in our experience, many of the non-profits we’ve worked with have strong CEOs who are thought leaders within their organization and/or more broadly. Social media, and particularly a blog, could be a good place to give them a voice. Good practice for op/ed. Great place to show media you might be a good content producer for their blog. Brand – this is where you’re describing who you are and what you offer the community. How are you different from similar service providers, what about your process makes you unique and thus effective? Is there an element of your brand, that people may not know about, that is central to who you are? LISA TODD EXAMPLE about travel.Expertise – This is one of our favorite tactics. This allows you to highlight what you’re good at while providing useful content to subscribers (that they could then use in their own lives). FRANKLIN FEDERAL EXAMPLE about current events. Partnerships and Marketing – leverage what you’re already doing with an audience that’s self selected as being interested in your organization’s goings on. This could be partnerships with other businesses, non-profits, media, etc.
- This next list of content comes from external sources, but is equally as effective. December is kinda a tricky month, given all of the real holidays. But for instance, the third Saturday of October is the “Sweetest Day of the Year”. April 15th is Tax Day, May 6th is National Nurses Day. Obviously not all of these holidays will apply to your organization, but I’m guessing some of them will. So if you’re looking for fun filler, this is a good place to go. The next content bin is Fun Facts & Stats. I like to refer to this as cocktail fodder. It’s the type of content that’s intriguing, surprising and makes the teller appear well informed. Its great if its funny, but I recognize that may not be appropriate for your organization, in which case statistics will fill that hole.While contests could be generated by your organization, they’re a great thing to push to external resources, if they’re available to you, because they’re very self contained. For years, contest were cost prohibitive, in that they required you to develop custom applications. These days, the restrictions have decreased and while you may still need to devote dollars to legal resources, they are a great way to activate existing audiences and build new ones. Lastly, I want to mention content curation from outside sources as a possible content bin. Your goal is to make your fans, followers, subscribers’ lives easier. By collecting content on their behalf (which may be too time consuming for them) and putting all of that content in one place, you’re making their life easier and building your own expertise. LIST OUTSIDE CONTENT SOURCES AND EXPLAIN.Hedge: Again, you may find there’s something specific to your organization that could be its own content bin, but this could at least serve as a starting point.
- Pass out Passion content bin document. So once, I’ve explored the various potential content sources, I like to put it into the template that I’m handing out right now. This exercise is two fold:It details out the various content buckets.It gets the wheels turning on how, from a process perspective, you’re going to collect that content. In other words, who’s responsible for what. On the front of this document, I’ve shared the content bins for one of my current clients. I’ll tell you now that we’re in the process of going through this exercise with Passion right now, so their Facebook page doesn’t reflect this. But I thought it was a really good example of how the sausage is made. So…a little background on Passion. Goals. Describe bins. OK, so now that you have a practical example of how this organization is populating content, I thought it might be fun for us to take 5 minutes to think about potential content buckets and sources from within your organization. I’ll be walking around, so feel free to ask me questions and or poll the people sitting around you on whether or not your ideas are relevant/interesting for a broader audience. At XX:XX, we’ll reconvene and I’d like for one (or if time allows maybe a few) of you to share some of your content ideas.
- OK, so now that we’ve talked about content, let’s talk about how to actually get that content. Here are a few tools I use, that I’ve found effective.
- OK…so now that we’ve talked about the content that’s available to us, let’s talk about where we want to put that. I’ve put together a list of platforms that are most requested by our clients. You’ll notice that by no means is this exhaustive…its just what we receive requests for. You’ll notice that Google+ is not here. My goal is to use your limited resources most effectively, and while I’d recommend setting up a profile, I wouldn’t recommend devoting time to customizing content for this platform. Additionally, you’ll notice that I have not included Tumbler. While I think it’s a great micro-blogging site, Lianna will do a much better job than me telling you how to leverage it for your organization!Talk through platforms.Instagram Note: hosting services vs. social network valuePinterest Note: They do a great job with attribution. If you post content, and someone repins it, they do a great job of siting you as the content originator. YouTube Note: hosting services vs. social network value. downside, greater expectation for production value or hyper creativity…hard to produce (strike gold) and expensive
- One last thing to consider, as you’re trying to determine where you need to be, is looking at the time commitment associated with being relevant. In order to be relevent, your posts need to be seen. On the other hand, they need to be seen, but shouldn’t be too dominant. On the screen, I’ve included some loose parameters, that we use with our clients. Again, this is not the end all be all, this is simply what we advise our clients. Twitter – space out over the dayYoutube – frequency relates to creating new content versus hosting existing video.Instagram – depends on how you’re using. Event example…using to host versus using the social platform.
- So as your deciding what platforms you’d like to maintain a presence, you want to look at demographics of each. There are tons of infographics on what platform is best for what demo. I’d encourage each of you to google that, as you’re making a decision. Once you’ve decided where you’d like to be, if its on multiple places, you may want to consider dashboarding. Explain Dashboarding. Providers include – Buffer, Sprout Social, Sales Force, Hootsuite. Great to use tools, provide additional analytics, just know how to use them. And most importantly, version your content. Hashtaging, tagging, highlighting, etc. Don’t copy and paste your message or mass broadcast it across all platforms.
- So…now, you’ve looked at your content sources, evaluated the various platforms and considered the time commitment associated with being effective on each. You’re ready to write your content. So…here’s a few tips we employ.
- Once you have content, you’ll want to put that into a template so that you can work it up the food chain. I’ve used Passion as our example again. Here’s how we took the bins and put that to practical use. Talk through posts (if time allows). I know this may be a little hard to read, so for those of you who are interested, please email me and I’d be happy to share this example, or the template itself, with you offline.
- Greg