Location: Queen Street Commons Café, 43 Queen St. South, Kitchener
Date: February 13th, 2017
Time: 7:00 PM
How can a Nonprofit organization make use of Social Media? Should a Nonprofit organization even use Social Media? What Social Media platform do you use? What sorts of things do you put on Social Media? Who puts it there? A team of SMEs? One person? Is this a full-time job? How much time does it take to maintain Social Media accounts for a Nonprofit organization? What will you do when your Social Media platform disappears? Or deletes your content? Or delivers your content to only a small set of viewers?
We have all the questions. Maybe we can find some answers together.
Bob and Marc
== Social Media ==
- Conversation started with employment
- Headhunters and placement agencies frequently call potential employees or contractors, but rarely result in employment or contracts.
- Salaries for developers are higher in Waterloo Region, due to competition from other tech firms.
- Social Media is all about the analytics
- Using analytics provided by the services, eg. https://analytics.twitter.com
- Analytics from different sites (Twitter, Facebook) are similar enough that direct comparisons can be made.
- Use some custom links to identify source of engagement on their own content
- e.g. use one URL for Twitter, another for Facebook to reach the same content
- Use Google Analytics for generic information
- How does Google identify the source of the visitor if the links are all the same? Or the URLs are all the same?
- Your following:
- Are your followers passive or engaged?
- Twitter is good for a large number of followers, but low engagement
- Facebook is the opposite (few followers, strong engagement)
- Linkedin is good for Business-To-Business
- Before starting on social media, ask “What is the organization’s goal for social media?”
- Distribute information (meetings, info about the cause, eg. environmental tips)
- Grow the organization
- Update frequency
- Twitter: 8-10 time per day
- Facebook: Once a day
- Search for ”how to optimize Facebook feed”
- Have a hashtag strategy (what is a hashtag strategy?)
- Staffing at one non-profit organization:
- 1 person for Twitter + Facebook
- 1 person for Instagram
- Need more staff (Reddit, other social media forums)
- Maintaining social media accounts by volunteers
- Takes lots of time! Split it up between people
- Automate some tasks (POSSE – Publish Once, Syndicate Self Everywhere)
- Automate feeds
- Facebook -> Twitter
- Blog -> GNUsocial -> Twitter -> Facebook
- “Twitter will be around forever”
- Some disagreement about that
- Whatever organization buys out Twitter will want to keep the eyeballs (users generating advertising revenue)
- Reddit is a great platform
- But nobody likes it
- Having a social media presence on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram will reach 90% of people online.
- The purpose of one non-profit organization is to change consumer behaviour
- How can that be measured?
- Are social media sites trustworthy?
- Social media sites are bad for your personal mental health
- Some people remove themselves from social media
- Social media sites are bad for your personal mental health
- Twitter is a conversation
- Really? 140 characters seems too short for meaningful conversation
- Twitter is (only) good for broadcast announcements
- A Grade 8 reading level is good for Twitter
- It takes skill to get more information into 140 characters than in long-form prose
- But too many abbreviations and leetspeek and others can’t understand
- “Dracula” by Bram Stoker was written as diary entries, good for syndication on Twitter
- Books are being replaced by social media
- so put novels on social media where people will read them
- How to be effective:
- ”Go where the people are”
- But that leaves out Free Software solutions like Friendica (Facebook substitute) or GNUsocial (Twitter substitute)
- ”Go where the people are”
- Wouldn’t it be nice
- if social media didn’t affect reading levels or comprehension
- people learned more evaluation and critical thinking, not rote memorization
- Filter bubble
- Facebook only shows those things you’ve already “liked”
- reinforces biases
- Recognize that Social Media is just a tool
- You can use it well
- …or you can use it poorly
- We (Non-profit organizations) are parasitic
- We’re using social media platforms for our own purposes, fully recognizing they’re not doing this for our benefit.
=== Meeting Closing Discussion ===
- Discussed CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority)
- supports the .ca domain extension for Canada
- most are aware of the organization
- result of discussion is to obtain the .ca version of the NPSA domain: kwnpsa.ca
=== Future Topics ===
- Monetization
- Branding (logos, names)