Social media is a fabulous place to get your message out as an Incredible Edible group, but it can be a challenging space for many.
In order to make it safe and easily managed by more than one member of your team, we’ve found writing a social media policy or statement is useful.
Write it as a group and revisit it once a year, or if you have some sort of social media crisis. Make sure you stick to it and feel comfortable to discuss the challenges involved – social media can be fast paced sometimes, so learn from your experiences. Make sure the policy is inclusive, kind and clear and pin it to the top of your Facebook group so people understand the ethos behind the group. You can pin things to the top of Twitter timelines too. And of course if you have a website, that is the ideal place to put all your content and share from your site to social media.
Some questions to answer to help develop your social media policy:
- What are the best social media platforms for your group now?
- Who is going to manage your social media platforms? Consider the time required and make sure your volunteers are happy to commit to it – you could arrange a rota to spread the work.
- What are your key messages? Find your collective voice. If there’s more than one person looking after your social media, agree in advance what to promote and when.
- Who do you want to engage with? Consider your stakeholders and what will keep them interested, so they’ll like/share your posts and increase your reach, or so they support your group on other ways.
- Sharing your social media approach across platforms – your social media statement can be pinned to the top of your Facebook group, put as a document into your Facebook page or, if you get to the point of having a website, put there for all to see.
- You could include information about what you do, your aims and you’re the fact you are all volunteers. Some words around who you might, or more importantly might not be aligned with. Who you are, or aren’t responsible for and to. Who runs the page/group/ Twitter stream, not necessarily by name but who are the group? Management committee? Wider group of volunteers?
- It’s also important to think about who might speak about your group on their own social media pages. Whilst it’s important that people don’t feel policed it is always a good idea to caveat personal pages and feeds with “all my own opinions”.
