Social media is one of the ways that our community hub, Wimblecomm, tells its story and interacts with its target audience. Over the years, we’ve employed various tactics to ensure that we raise awareness of what we’re doing, whilst celebrating all of the people, organisations and initiatives that matter to us. Keep reading to learn about a few of these methods and see how you can adapt them for your own social media.
We Produce a Calendar of Important Days
Important dates and public holidays occur throughout the year and provide a great opportunity for us to engage in wider conversations, and remind people of the various things that our organisation supports. In recent years, we have taken the time to create an internal content calendar which highlights days that are of interest, and giving us ideas of content that we might want to produce and post in line with these dates. As a small charity, occasions such as Small Charities Week and National Volunteers Day come to mind. On the given day(s,) we will simply add a hashtag that people are using to mark the occasion to our own posts and share any other relevant content that we have in relation to the topic. We find this particularly helpful when we want to promote older content from the Wimblecomm website which is still relevant and useful.
We Celebrate our Members
We always aim to celebrate our members and showcase the great works that they do across Merton whenever we can. As well as publishing their news, stories, and events on Wimblecomm, we use social media to spread the word even further, and ensure that the content on our community hub is being promoted to people who show an interest in what we do. These people tend to be those that follow us on social media, as they are the ones who will initially see our posts. But, with social media being as big as it is nowadays, there is always potential for our posts to reach our followers followers and those further afield. So, as well as giving direct shout outs to our members, we ensure that we share, like and comment on their posts to help the word spread that little bit further. We never know who might see it.
We Execute Social Media Campaigns
In recent years, we have run social media campaigns such as Merry Merton and lockdown stories to try to raise awareness of things happening in our borough, and bring the local community together online. Creating a hashtag and encouraging your own communities to use it is a great way of leading group conversations that anyone can get involved in. It also allows people to see all posts related to your hashtag by searching for it. Using hashtags that already exist is also a great way for you to join conversations that already exist and add your piece to the puzzle.
We Share Content When Others Mention and Celebrate Our Work
As with most community initiatives and organisations, people make it happen. So, when people engage with us and share our posts, we try to like the posts as a way of saying thank you, and we re-share them in whatever capacity that particular social media platform allows. Engagement is something that most people strive for on social media, so why not engage with those that support you? It’s a win-win situation, and you might just find that they do the same for you in the future. Team work makes the dream work after all.
These are all ideas that you can start actioning on your social media today, so give it a try, and feel free to tag/mention us in your posts on social media. We try to share and engage with as many posts as we can.
Follow/connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Written by Genevieve Etienne-Farrell who managed the Wimblecomm social media over the past couple of years.
