In a volunteer organization or non-profit, spreading the word on opportunities to connect and share is where social media shines.
When a group, or individual wants to communicate the thought to have to log in to a separate LinkedIn account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, or other places to connect with your community is not an enticing prospect to manage.
However, the time comes for communication engagement across multiple, social media accounts with communication valued for multiple community personas can seem a lot of effort.
Two recommendations were made to Project Management Institute New York Chapter (PMINYC), where, I am both a card-carrying member of PMI and volunteer. Both recommendations are easily applied to other organizations or an individual who wants to launch and manage their social media identity.
Communication has always been important, October’s PMINYC Seminar on social media with Lean principles presents an opportunity for more people to see how and what information sharing through social media helps.
1st recommendation: I have is to use either of two free applications that allow you to write and schedule future release dates and times any amount of Tweets you want. I use TweetDeck [now X Pro] another is Hootsuite both are easy to download and offer quick setup, both are, again, free and allow:
- Schedule Tweets;
- Download versions to manage from desktop;
- Online management through a web browser;
- Send same post to multiple accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others, from the same dashboard
- Send unique post to each; and
- Filters to allow you to monitor and contribute other Project Management-related tweets or discussions
Both TweetDeck and Hootsuite work well for anyone managing many accounts.
2nd recommendation: compliments the first and also improves other social media efforts: Create a bit.ly account, if PMINYC does not already have one. This free link shortening service takes a link, such as: https://tobyelwin.com/community-persona-for-sharepoint-intranet-design/ and shorten it to this: https://j.mp/RuOWDB.
Why is a link shortener important:
- Twitter only allows 140 characters, link shortening saves many characters;
- The link is more manageable for email newsletters and other places where a long url is may get get cut off or not work;
- Track clicks, such as clicks per day, referrers [who forwarded or commented on your link];
- Also, get an API key that you can enter into TweetDeck so when you enter a long link, it automatically shortens the link and tracks it with you account so you can see the results on one dashboard [see TweetDeck dashboard below]