Social media is a positive force for change because you can quickly and easily update people with what’s going on, make connections with new people and organisations as well as let everyone know when and where your next work party is.
There is an art to good and successful social media and this section gives some ideas on developing these skills to support your Incredible activities.
All messaging should be positive
To sustain positive change, all messaging should be positive, even if sometimes that is a difficult ask. By focusing on the positive part of your message and not any underlying issues, you will gain more people in your social media networks, who will share far more messages that are positive than any others.
Never engage in an argument on social media
Ignore negative comments and where possible, if comments are becoming unpleasant, either shut commenting down or, if necessary, delete the post. It’s rarely necessary to delete a post, but rather that than a conversation getting out of hand.
Ensure lots of sharing
The magic formula is a third your own content, a third shared content and a third campaign type content that you are focusing on for a week, or a month at a time. Campaigns such as National Gardening Week, Kindness Day, Earth Day and others are great ways of getting good engagement on all platforms. Equally, share posts from people you like, admire and share aims and an ethos with.
Understand the differences between platforms and share content appropriately. Don’t just share all your Facebook posts to Twitter, or use Instagram as a quick way to post everywhere as this is very poor social media work and will soon see people unfollowing you. Many people who use twitter, don’t use Facebook for example, and so can’t open your posts if they are just links from Facebook. Whilst all of our time is important, and generally we all need an extra day per week at least, taking time over social media posts will pay off in the long term. Putting different people from your group in charge of each platform may help.
