Tip of the Week

Social content is your chance to tell the stories you want to engage your supporters, recruit new ones and drive people to action. There’s a ton of tips out there on the metric driven insights – when to post, where in what language, and so on. In this week’s tip, Strategy Director, Anna Nolan, focuses more on the questions that go through a creative campaigner’s head before producing content.

Building or borrowing?
One of the first things to ask is “Does this content already exist or do I need to create it?” If the content is interesting and relevant, your audience will engage and share it.  On many of today’s popular social sites the curator reigns supreme, versus the content producer. Think about how you can add to the curated content to tie in themes you’ve been campaigning on. Brand or nah? 
If you have a strong brand, that’s a huge asset – people know you, they like you and they trust you. But social media is an unbranded space and all the data shows unbranded content performs better. The question is then how can you minimize your brand so you can keep its utility without hurting sharing? Or can you remove your brand from some of your content altogether? Is it more important people engage and share, or that they know it’s you?Head or heart?
If presentation of facts alone were enough for people to make the right decisions, the world would be a very different place. And if sheer emotion was enough to change things, well, we would never be done sharing pictures of abuses and tragedies. Content for social is about finding the balance between fact and emotion. How do you strike that balance? With every piece of content ask yourself: what is this saying and why would someone share this? It takes time but it’s so worth it. Anna works on The Syria Campaign. You can view the team’s social content here.