Social Media For Social Good

by Buzz Factory Agency | Apr 22, 2021 | Nonprofits, Social Media

Many people still think that social media is only there to offer trivial or fun content. Others think that what works on some social media platforms like Instagram can’t be taken seriously. But, there’s a lot more behind that. Why do top organizations put so much effort into social media? How effective are these channels?

When it comes to connecting with their audiences, many nonprofits experience the exact same challenge. They do meaningful work, they have worthy causes, but no one seems to notice. Why? They don’t know their audience, they don’t know how to deliver the right message, they don’t have a strategy, they aren’t willing to invest time and money, and ultimately, they don’t know how to connect with their audience.

UNICEF’s way of using social media for social good paves a nice and smooth path for the NGOs to follow. Let’s find out how other nonprofits can achieve their fundraising goals through social media.

social media for social good - Buzz Factory

How to Link Innovation and Impact to Social Media

Step 1: Think of the Impact

To make a real impact in your audience, you need to follow these steps :

First, you have to communicate your difference, your new methodologies, technologies and innovations. If you are not yet innovating, you have to communicate about your approach and your solutions to advance your cause.

Secondly, it is important to focus on impact; how are you improving, advancing your cause? The solution is to do this by creating an emotional link between the audience and your content. It is important to appeal to emotion; your target audience needs to feel the sentiment you are trying to communicate through text, images or videos. It’s important to understand your audience very well, psychographics and demographics are essential to know what message resonates best with them. What type of content to use? The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, the same goes for video, a video is worth a thousand pictures.

Finally, you have to connect your work with your audience; show how it affects them or impacts them personally to advance your cause. What is the value to humanity and also to donors? Calling for a specific action, however small, is a commitment, a first step that will grow and change things. It is your work to regularly show how they are changing and improving thanks to them and to you, to the common effort of both. This is what powers all things.

Step 2. Leverage the Power of Social Media

Whatever your top priorities are: fundraising, building brand awareness, recruiting volunteers or sharing news: Social media is the perfect tool for most of those goals.

Why? Because to achieve your goals, you will need to reach your audience where they are and exchange, on social media. The mobile penetration rate of social media in Europe is over 90%. This means that there is no shortage of opportunities to find people who can support your cause through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. Also think about a consistent budget to invest in social media, without which the effect of any campaign will be limited.

The right use of social media gives you the opportunity to promote your non-profit organisation and find people to help you with your mission.

Ideas for using Social Media for Social Good

Share stories

You can share inspirational or motivational stories on your platform, along with images and videos. Knowing the basics of storytelling is important. It’s not talking about your organisation all the time, but about your impact, about how the world is a better place because of your contribution. Show the human side of your organisation, your community, your team, the people behind the scenes. It’s a great way to connect with your audience and raise awareness. World Wildlife Fund is a great example, here their Facebook page with great fresh and inspiring stories.

Team up with influencers

In addition, it is important to enlist the help of influencers. Whether it’s a celebrity, micro-influencers or macro-influencers, engage them to foster leadership and gain visibility. It’s also a great way to make new connections, along with promoting social good. Knowing who the right influencers are for your organisation is no easy task. It needs to be very well regulated and defined. Both parties expect to gain from this collaboration, and it is often not obvious. At Buzz Factory we have worked with many influencers and can help you manage this part.

Throw a small challenge

There are many campaigns that trend all over the internet, which have an impact related to social good. Like many influencers, they raised money for a good cause while doing the Ice-Bucket challenge or the campaign Movember to spread awareness about men’s health issues. Make it easy for your donors to share their action on social media right after they do it. With the donation module, they only have to click once to share their donation with their followers, family and friends. There are several solutions for this like this one for WordPress, GiveWP.

Listen your community

Social media listening can help you understand the needs of your target audience. They tell you what the public and your community feel and think about your organisation. This activity provides important insights and valuable information about the public perception of an organisation and the success of a campaign. It is not just about analysing the quantity but the quality of what is being said. You can use all this information to correct or stop messages that are not perceived properly, create new messages. Network listening definitely improves the use of social media and your digital strategy.

Conclusion

The advantage of social media is that it helps to extend the reach of any organisation. Your content is key! But it is also important to allocate a significant budget to advertising, without which your content will have no impact. Unfortunately, the era of free visibility is over. Social media work allows two-way communication between your organisation and your followers. People can respond to your posts by liking, commenting or sharing them. It’s not just about posting, it’s about responding, educating, motivating and driving action.

The possibilities are endless in terms of the magnitude of impact and support you can get from social media. Remember that the most important thing is to have clear objectives, a solid strategy and a good understanding of your audience.

We’ve just shared our thoughts, and we’d be more than interested in getting your feedback. For almost a decade, Buzz Factory has been working with local and international NGOs to promote their social campaigns, and you can utilize our talented team to take your campaign to the next level. From Switzerland, we run campaigns at home and around the world, be it for animal protection, children’s aid, education and much more.

Maximizing for Social Media: How to Repurpose Your Content for Multiple Platforms

by Buzz Factory Agency | Feb 23, 2021 | Nonprofits, SMEs, Social Media

Creating content is a difficult task, but one of the most rewarding in terms of visibility and conversion. It requires a lot of time and effort. Content creation is an art that requires skills and expertise that may seem hard to acquire for professionals that are not digital writers. However, content should be the core of your strategy and must be used intelligently.

Creating quality content requires strong research, writing, designing, editing/proofreading, and time management, which may not be your forte. You need to be well aware of where you want your content to sit on your website.

While creating fresh content is one thing, repurposing it for multiple platforms is a different ballgame. A great content strategy always incorporates content repurposing.

It should address how the content could be tailored for selected social media platforms.

Which content format or what type of content works best on a platform? Which style should you follow and maintain on another?

This blog is all about repurposing your content for multiple platforms. We are sure it will address some of the major concerns you might have and provide you with a solution.

So, let’s get started!

How to Repurpose Your Content

In the conference on Global Marketing Day, we discovered various examples on how we could repurpose content on multiple platforms. Before anything, you need to be familiar with your audience and their expectations.

For better awareness about the audience’s expectations on each social media platform, it is necessary to go through different analyses and be aware of what customers need. Let’s share an example:

In the conference, Cristy Garrat, Head of Digital Video & Social Media at CNBC International, presented a fine example. She showed how we could repurpose content to various social media channels.

Some time back, CNBC ran a TV series called The Brave Ones. It was an international series with 40-minute episodes, and it earned quite a success as well. Obviously, they wanted to repurpose the content of that series. For CNBC, there were two challenges:

How could they repurpose that content?
How could they move that content into modern-day’s digital era?

Buzz Factory digital marketing social media smartphone people timelapse street

Here’s what CNBC did and what you should learn

Step #1 Always check if the content is worth repurposing

First, they started by uploading small cuts of the series on YouTube. They made sure that the videos remained short so that the audience didn’t get bored and stayed connected with them. The focus was on measuring engagement.

Step #2: Create a marketing campaign

After seeing that the content enhanced and got a lot more attention on the web, they decided to go with the advertising. They began creating appealing images, with some texts, brought directly from the TV series. They also started to write articles and put them on their website. In the articles, there were some smaller snippets.

Step #3: Repurpose the content differently according to the platforms

Next, the point was to adapt the content on different platforms.

Repurposing content for Facebook and Twitter

People using Facebook and Twitter don’t necessarily have earphones. That means the audio is not always available. It was an objective to find an alternative, repurposing content.

So, they came up with the idea of adding subtitles to images that were presented on the TV show. To garner more engagement, they used animated subtitles. With a typewriting tool and CSS animation, sometimes the script was in bold, and so on.

Repurposing content for Instagram

Regarding the Instagram account, the decision to do a real take over for season 2 was made. They made nice visuals and presentations, with infographics and descriptive content.

One other way Instagram helps content creators and brands publish their content and generate fame is via interesting quizzes, posts, stories (we’ll discuss these), and questions. Once a page is public or open for others to follow, all these features can be utilized by the people to take part in the campaigns. They might sound very simple but are extremely efficient.

What happens in turn of answering questions or taking part? Reward your user’s actions with something that improves their trust in your brand. For CNBC, it was them talking about actors giving a shoutout, causing a huge boost in engagement and brand love.

IGTV videos

IGTV videos allow you to create long video-form content, and that’s what the brand utilized for their show. This kind of action creates a significant increase in the engagement rate.

They further decided to modify the content in a visual way and adapted it into IGTV videos that were more fun.

That’s the key purpose of content – to quickly grab attention and pass this lead off to somewhere, which compels the user to take action in favor of the brand

Key Considerations to Content Repurposing

Device Orientation

Using good infographics is key to getting your point across your followers. Some social media platforms are more susceptible to this form of advertising, while others aren’t.

Majority of the users have mobile devices. The point being, the content has to be repurposed in terms of the usage or orientation of the device as well. For mobile, the usage of infographics is extremely useful.

Platform’s Strengths and Limitations

Next, considering Twitter’s limitation on the number of words, there’s also the need to present content in a short form. That requires you to understand two things:

The purpose of the message you’re going to send
An understanding of the audience it’s posted for

This will help grasp quick attention and open pathways to lead to other platforms for a more thorough look at the advertisement.

Present Your Content Differently

When you’ll be leading your branding campaigns on several platforms, the same content can’t be repeated as is.

Let’s say the brand starts off generating leads from Twitter. It will be important to know where these leads go to. Facebook and Instagram are two other, picture-intensive social media platforms that will require more attention. Here, the content can be a subtitled-video (like we discussed before) or long-posts with quick attention-grabbing sentences. That’s on the level of the copy!

Utilizing Time-specific Content

The last decade has been very intensive in terms of ‘stories’. These are pictures, which have a special meaning. They are short and timed, so they can be seen for a limited time. That’s one other medium where a brand might be required to put up content.

However, most social platforms allow users to re-use the content which was shared in the past, but is not active. This feature lets you leverage the old content, and prevents you from recreating the same content again and again.

Conclusion

This was an explanatory example of how a brand can repurpose the content across different platforms. We’ve seen that it is possible to transform some text into a video just by enhancing it into subtitles. It’s possible to go from video visuals to just simple images.

It can also help with repurposing content by getting inspired by a text and illustrating the text through an image. Generating content, adding attention-grabbers, and call-to-actions on relevant platforms based on their audience is the way to excellence.

Though this is hard, it’s definitely doable with research and actual experience of how the audience reacts (which you can get by means of feedback and polls).

If you need assistance in repurposing your content for multiple social media networks or even creating fresh content on your social media accounts, you can talk to Buzz Factory. We have experienced social media marketers, familiar with all content formats. We can help you optimize your content for any platform, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or more.