Social media provides associations a powerful tool to recruit members and promote their cause.
The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) provides an example. The CMA turned to social media to promote its “Demand a Plan” campaign that urged development of a national seniors care strategy. The association initially hoped for 10,000 campaign supporters by Election Day. By turning to social media, it convinced 24,000 supporters to sign its petition within a few months. The campaign hashtag #SeniorsPlan was shared over 3,000 times.
The CMA urged its 80,000 physician members to share its message and provided advocacy training, guidelines, and pre-authorized posts and videos for members as well as employees to share.
Associations can follow these recommendations on use of social media to grow their memberships and promote their cause.
Set some goals. Before your first posts, establish exactly what you aim to achieve on social media. Goals can be modest initially. The goals can include membership growth, changing public opinion, affecting legislation. Know your association goals. Create social media content to achieve those goals.
Social media alerts. Associations commonly send action alerts via email to initiate a call to action. But PR and marketing experts urge associations to regularly share action alerts through social media. Social sharing tools can help associations share content on different social channels, better reach supporters, and significantly increase reach to new advocates.
A recruitment toolkit. Consider creating a member recruitment toolkit that includes a fact sheet with your mission, a pricing sheet, and “Reasons to Join” sheet, advises Callie Walker at MemberClicks. Also include a few pre-written social media blurbs that members can share.
Use your time wisely. Social media requires a significant time investment. Resource-limited associations may worry they lack staff time. The solution is to determine the favorite networks of members. Dedicate time to a small number – or one – social network.
Follow best practices such as including popular, relevant hashtags, images or videos in posts, posting multiple times per day, and interacting with others instead of only posting your own content. The most successful social media accounts share ideas, thoughtful posts, feel-good stories, and humor. Share content from other associations that is relevant to your mission. “You could even get media coverage by connecting with local media and sharing your advocacy posts or action centers with them,” says Khalil Grant at digital advocacy firm Muster.
Expect mistakes. Some associations may worry that they’ll make mistakes on social media. Fear not. Everyone makes mistakes on social media at some point. There are ways to recover from mistakes on social media. “Owning your mistakes strengthens your relationships with your audience,” says marketing and communications professional Mel Kettle.
Red Cross used humor to recover from a mistake. After a social media specialist accidently tweeted about drinking Dogfish Head beer, thinking she was posting to her personal account, Red Cross tweeted: “We’ve deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.” Dog Fish Beer then asked followers to donate to the Red Cross, with the hashtag #gettngslizzerd.
Monitor and measure social metrics. Most social media outlets have their own native analytics, such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, that report interactions such as likes, shares, and comments and how engaged your supporters are your content. Many associations may be better served by a social media monitoring and measurement service. Relying on native analytics requires logging into multiple websites. A high-quality media monitoring dashboard can integrate data from all networks in addition to data from Google Analytics and traditional news media. Social media listening can provide essential information and insights about what people say about your association and cause that you’re unlikely to obtain through native social media analytics.
Promote your events before, during and after. Social media is a great way to recruit for your events, as well as to build anticipation for them, says Peggy Smith, director of product marketing at Community Brands Promote your events on social media and post live updates and recaps afterwards to encourage anyone who didn’t attend to come to the next one. Sharing photographs from the event can boost your social media traffic.
Bottom Line: Associations can win sizeable PR and marketing victories with social media. The key is to arm employees, members and other advocates with the right tools and develop a solid social media marketing plan.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
