Top Tips on Social Media for Campaigns

Posted 10 years ago

In February 2014 Tidal organised a workshop on using social media for campaigns, facilitated by Pete Speller, online campaigner for Greenpeace.

In the workshop the group came up with the following hallmarks for a successful social media:

 

Pete and the groups hallmarks of successful social media (what gets shares and re-tweets)

  • Humour
  • Defined/Achieveable/realistic asks
  • Personalised – telling real people’s stories
  • Underdog/ david and goliath element
  • Jeopardy – the tension the what happens next element feeling of something happening live – Ice climb and EDF21 examples
  • Conversion / data capture – getting people to move from sharing something / liking a page to joining your email list / attending an event – building longer term relationshoips with supporters
  • Holy grail of digital activism is user generated content

  • infographics – creative digestible ways of sharing info
  • subverting / hijacking a company’s social media
  • having a genuine message
  • using memes (eg grumpy cat etc)
  • Quick response to events
  • variety
  • naming and shaming
  • anger and outrage

 

We also had a  discussion of top tips around some of the groups questions.

 

Tips and tools:

  • To scramble faces in pictures use obscuracam, an android app which strips metadata and scrambles faces or use picmonkey or canva, or gimp if you aren’t using android
  • We are social media lemmings – If someone has already done something it makes you more likely to do it – eg get your friends to join an event first before sharing it so that there are already people signed up when it appears in people’s timelines
  • Profile pics – good way of getting people to show support for a campaign
  • Timing of facebook posts and tweets is pretty arbitrary. For Greenpeace the peak time was around 9pm but was pretty high throughout the day. There is no magic formula of when to post but it’s a good idea to analyse the success of your posts at different times.
  • You can use facebook insights and crowd booster (paid for service with 30 day free trial) to gain insights into the success of your social media posts
  • If you’re thinking of advertising on facebook then promoted posts achieve a lot more than adverts
  • If you have multiple people using one twitter account who have their own twitter accounts then you can use group tweet to tweet together from single account. This saves having to log out of personal account and into group account and saves accidental posting of personal tweets/nude pics from group account
  • How to deal with trolls – there are a number of schools of thought on this – from don’t feed the trolls / responding but not getting too drawn in. Greenpeace has started making ironic responses to climate denying trolls and had a consultation where users said they were happy with them banning people who are offensive/repeat trollers. Suggestions of good house rules/groups agreeements were puffles the dragon fairy http://adragonsbestfriend.wordpress.com/house-rules/ and LUU fem soc.