Everyone makes mistakes, but if those mistakes are from your organization’s social media accounts and not caught in time, they will live on the internet forever. Whether it’s a big brand or public figure that writes from the wrong account or posts something reprehensible, simply deleting the content doesn't cut it these days. So how can an organization mitigate mistakes as much as possible? By putting fail safes in place that will help reduce the likelihood of an error.
Plan Your Content
A good rule of thumb that most agencies tend to follow for their clients is to have at least a month’s worth of content planned out in advance. Take a look at a national days calendar, a calendar of holidays and your organization’s schedule of events and classes and plan content around that. Posting daily is always helpful, so plan to have at least 20 days’ worth of content ready to go. Share info about your camps, classes and programs. Highlight a member of your community (with their permission), ask for donations if you are hosting a drive and even have some fun with holidays like National Pie Day.
Multiple Reviews & Revisions
It’s important to have a social media team rather than just relying on one person. You’ll not only get multiple ideas and perspectives, but you’ll also be able to catch mistakes more easily. Have each member of the team—or if you don’t have a team have at least two to three people—review, allow them to make updates to the content and sign off when complete.
Don’t Mix Dashboards
Social media dashboards like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Sprinklr and TweetDeck are a great way to manage multiple social accounts in one place. If you are utilizing social media dashboards, be very mindful of the accounts you have on the dashboards. You do not want to be posting the wrong content to the wrong social account. Avoid adding personal social media accounts to the dashboard of your choice. If you intend to tweet to your personal account and accidentally have your organization’s account turned on, that tweet could get you in trouble.
Avoid “Hashtag Hijacking”
The homepage of Twitter has the top 10 trends worldwide (you can also sort by country and city), which show what people are talking about the most at that time. Piggybacking on a trend by incorporating it into your messaging can get you in trouble with the tweeters. If a trend doesn’t relate directly to one of your messages, it’s best to stay away.
Don’t Heavily Rely on Interns
This is a classic no-no in social media. Don’t just turn over social media to your interns because they are from the Facebook generation. You need a strategy and oversight from the leaders in your organization to monitor your social media efforts.
Facebook has been around for around 17 years. Twitter was created in 2008 and Instagram in 2010. There are plenty of educated, able and experienced social media professionals who are qualified to run your social media organic and paid marketing efforts.
ACTIVEWorks Endurance, ACTIVENet and ACTIVEWorks Camp & Class manager all offer social media sharing tools and make it easy for participants to utilize various channels to increase content sharing to their friends and family. Increase registrations to your events, camps and classes with ACTIVE.
