Social Media/Meeting Notes for 2017-02-13

Monday, 13 February 2017

Event Announcement: https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/237362708/

Meeting notes:

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?

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
    • eg. use one URL for Twitter, another for Facebook to reach the same content
    • Use Google Analytics for generic information
    • How does Google identifiy the source of the visitor if the links are all the same? Or the URLs are all the same?

• 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)

• 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?)

• 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

• Automate feeds
  • Facebook -> Twitter
  • Blog -> GNUsocial -> Twitter -> Facebook

• 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

• "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

• 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)

• 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.

Future topics:

• Monetization
• Branding (logos, names)