Do you remember last summer’s ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? Within weeks of its launch, everyone’s social media feeds became a stream of videos of friends and family with lengthy lists of tagged names.
Before the campaign was over, it seemed that everyone knew someone who had taken the plunge. Social media is a tremendous vehicle for pitching and launching your cause or campaign. But, how can you leverage the power of social media as the Ice Bucket Challenge did?
Here are 5 tips for pitching your campaign via social media.
Use All Forms – Especially Visual
Gone are the days when a tweet is just 140 characters strung into a thought. Facebook statuses are no longer just stories in narrative form. Today’s social media is a much more visual medium, favoring photos and videos, and anything eye-catching. And with new, web-based photo and video editing tools, creating the assets to catch the eyes is easier than ever before. For great image editing capabilities, complete with preset templates and backgrounds, try PicMonkey and Canva.
Choose Among Social Channels
Over time, each social media channel has become better for some things than others. Naturally, your audience will flock to one or two and you may find your story translates better across one channel or another.
So as you’re preparing to pitch your campaign, look over the various social media options and pick one or two to focus on. While this may feel as though you are alienating potential donors, the additional energy and focus you are able to devote to publicizing your campaign will make your work more effective overall.
As you think through your options, be sure to think beyond Twitter and Facebook. Many successful campaigns have made Instagram their home and even Vine and Snapchat are becoming useful campaign tools.
Start Big
Before you first pitch your campaign, spend some time growing your chosen social accounts. The more followers you have, the greater impact your message will have. But also be sure to grow carefully. Buying followers or growing fast into an unengaged base can hurt in the long run.
Regardless of how big you grow, reach out to partners and supporters, especially those with big followings, and specifically, ask for shares on your behalf. After all, the power of social media lies in your connections.
Respond And Engage
Carrying on conversations with your followers energizes your campaign and institutes goodwill. The supporters you engage with feel more connected and those who see your conversations will form a positive image of you as a friendly, approachable organization. Social media’s ability to let you create real connections with your followers is something you should definitely take advantage of.
But these days, engaging in social media has an additional benefit – extra promotion. On Facebook, for example, each time someone comments on your post, that post reappears in news feeds and more people see it.
Tweet And Tag
Let’s go back to the Ice Bucket Challenge. The brilliance of that campaign was that each post about it tagged a number of additional people – friends and family of someone who took the challenge could no longer avoid knowing about the campaign. By tagging other people, you specifically call something out and grab attention.
