Growing Organically: How we’re increasing Action for Children’s social media footprint
This year, we’ve been hard at work developing Action for Children’s first-ever organic social media strategy, which is designed to set out how we use our channels to achieve the charity’s overall communications goals.
Here’s what we’re aiming to achieve with our strategy:
Our work has been challenging, fascinating and rewarding. We’ve set out a plan for optimising our organic reach and engagement, estimating a 10% increase in year-on-year overall reach. This additional reach is so important in allowing us to talk to new supporters and making them aware of the work we do.
Alongside new targets for reach, engagement, and new followers, for the first time we’ve set targets for web traffic and revenue generated through our organic social media channels.
If we’re to achieve these ambitious targets, it’s crucial we understand as much as we can about how we’ve approached our social media channels in the past, and what needs to change.
Who’s in our social media communities?
By learning more about the needs, motivations and behaviours of our audiences, we can respond with content that engages them and meets their needs. This means we’ll be able to engage more supporters, raise more money and ultimately help more vulnerable children and families across the UK.
Through our social media channels, we’re able to see rich demographic data which tells us a lot about who they are, where they are, and their interests.
On Facebook, for example, we know that our audience is 84% women. Of them, 59% are aged between 35 and 54.
On Instagram, roughly 20% of Action for Children followers post from London, and 85% of our Twitter audience is interested in politics.
Recently, as an organisation, we created segments of our supporters based on market research data.
Combining our audience data, segments, personas and insights can give us useful clues about who makes up our audiences. However, this information is often qualitative and uses assumption based on attitudinal surveys — what people say.
We use these to complement to other evidence-led approaches, such as our content audit, which examines behavioural data — what people do.
What type of content engages our supporters?
We wanted to identify the strengths and weaknesses of organic social media content on each of our channels and learn more about what engages our audiences.
To find out, we analysed every piece of content we shared in 2019 — over 3,000 social media posts, categorising our posts in a number of different ways, including content topic, time of day, sentiment, and type of visual asset.
When we compared engagement levels across these different dimensions, we identified a huge number of interesting things, including:
- a mismatch in post timing between our activity and when our audience was most engaged. We posted 49% of our content between 10am and 1pm in 2019 but this generated only 42% of our total engagement.
- We found that images of real people generated far greater engagement than stock photography or abstract images and infographics. These can include our supporters, services staff, or even celebrities.
- When we analysed sentiment on Twitter, we were surprised to find that content with a positive message generated almost four times as much engagement as posts with a negative sentiment.
- Across all channels, emotional wellbeing content resonated with our followers, particularly with shares on Facebook.
Challenging assumptions
Our analysis confirmed many of the assumptions we held, allowing us to formalise our approach to developing and sharing content. At the same time, it’s challenged many of the things we thought were true.
The performance of our information, advice and guidance content is a good example. In 2019, it generated average or below average engagement — but in 2020 it has performed significantly better.
With most other factors remaining unchanged, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic seems to be a major factor in a renewed appetite for it, as parents seek support in an unprecedented situation.
Through Parent Talk, we’ve been able to respond with reactive, timely and relevant content. It highlights how quickly the behaviour of our audiences can change — and underlines the importance of continuous and rigorous testing.
What are we changing?
Our research has led us to many recommendations. Here are just a few of them.
What we found through our content audit led us to create guidelines to change the type, volume and frequency of the content we share on different channels, as well as some of the procedures and practices we use to develop it.
We’re now conducting content audits like this every three months, and the social media team have developed new data analysis skills to support an ongoing evidence-led approach.
Our content audit revealed that we need to spend more time with our social media communities, listening to and interacting positively with our supporters. This will help position Action for Children as a community hub rather than a broadcaster of content.
Getting the family involved
We’d love to create a culture in which everyone at Action for Children gets involved in creating the consistent, high quality content to engage our audiences.
Based on what we’ve discovered in our research, we created five basic principles for creating a social media post. Whenever anyone briefs the Digital team, we’ll ask them to have these at the front of their mind.
During the development of our strategy, we’ve experienced unprecedented changes in the way we live our lives. With this in mind, our social media strategy should be treated as a flexible, living document, open to change.
If you’d like to find out more about Action for Children’s social media strategy, please drop us a line at digital@actionforchildren.org.uk.
