Meet the Managers: Nicola Gee, WWF UK

Here at Social Misfits we are huge advocates of equipping our clients, friends and partners with practical and tangible tips for running their social media communities successfully. We do this through our publications, our #MisfitsLive events and now, through our new blog series, Meet the Managers.

In this series, we’re connecting with the Social Media Managers responsible for running the online communities of large organisations. We’re asking them to share their top tips and learnings to help those managing communities of smaller organisations, who may not have the same resources and budgets.

For our first edition, we spoke with WWF UK’s Senior Social Media Manager, Nicola Gee.

WWF is the world’s leading independent conservation organisation working to create a world where people and wildlife can thrive together by putting nature first, tackling the climate crisis, making food systems sustainable and ensuring habitats and species can flourish. Nicola joined the organisation back in 2016 as Communications Executive, becoming Senior Manager in 2019.

In your eyes, what makes a piece of social content great?

The clue is in the name: great social content is social! It engages rather than broadcasts.

It stirs an emotion and conversation — either between a supporter and your organisation, or within the supporter’s own networks. And it’s relevant to the audience at the time they’re receiving it and to the platform they’re receiving it on.

Can you breakdown the process you go through from concepting content ideas to posting on your channels?

Our first step for creating any social media content is understanding who we want to reach and which social media channels they can be reached on.

At WWF UK we have a ‘vision’ for our social media channels. For example, our Facebook page is the ‘charity channel’, whereas Twitter is our ‘expert channel’ and Instagram is our ‘community channel’. These visions detail which audiences are on which channels and what content resonates with them.

Once the channels are identified, the second step is understanding which regular content segments could suit our activity or whether we want to throw in a wild card (excuse the pun) as a way of testing a new concept. For the wild card option, my team run regular brainstorms with other team members with the aim of getting as many ideas down as possible and seeing which stick.

We’re very lucky at WWF UK to have a wealth of amazing photography that we can chop and change to suit channels. We also have a very brilliant content team who can shoot and edit plus a talented digital illustrator, so we can experiment with different content mediums.

And it doesn’t just end when the content is posted. We analyse every piece of content we share so we can continue learning and refining our output.

What one trend do you think should be on everyone’s radar over the next 12 months?

Chatbots! I used to see them as robotic customer service tools that no-one really used, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. They are a great asset to have, particularly if you receive a lot of customer service questions and want to add automation to your processes.

Brands are also experimenting with chat bots, with a lot of attention of gamifying people’s experiences. For example, we recently ran a Facebook Messenger gift bot where supporters answered multiple questions about their friends to find out which WWF animal adoption they should gift them for Christmas. (A lot of swimmers received dolphin adoptions!)

As you can see from my example, building a chat bot doesn’t need to be a daunting process or something brand spanking new. Look at what products you already have to offer and see how they can be utilised within this feature.

Name one tool you could not live without when it comes to managing WWF-UK’s social media channels.

Falcon is a lifesaver when it comes to social media moderation!

We use it at WWF UK to respond to all inbound messages across our channels as well as scheduling content and reporting on its performance. It has an inbox zero approach as well as an inbuilt responses section and a simple to use assignment section so you can assign comments to other team members.

There are countless other benefits and it also has a social listening feature which is very useful if you want to dip your toes into this area.

What is the one piece of social media best practice that you swear by but rarely see followed?

K.I.S.S (keep it short and simple)

People are time poor and need to know within a split second what you want them to do; from taking an action to simply feeling an emotional connection to your content. Yet I still constantly see convoluted social media content that’s either full of jargon or is too long-winded to have an impact.

Use language that you’d use if you were speaking to the person in real life — and there will be times when you read something out loud and catch yourself thinking ‘what am I actually trying to say?!’

Can you give an example of a social media crisis that you’ve had to handle, and how you went about it?

‘Social media crisis’ doesn’t always mean something bad has happened.

When the Amazon rainforest was on fire during the August 2019, we shared a tweet that went viral. We didn’t expect it to, and we were exposed to the largest number of inbound messages we had ever seen! Most comments were from people wanting to know how they could help but at the time of posting we had no tangible action for a supporter to take.

We weren’t prepared for this response. Our next steps involved pulling together a project group made up of members of staff across multiple teams (web, email, social, fundraising, programmes) and identify the most urgent matters we needed to address. In this case it was working out how we could respond to supporters and what meaningful actions they could take.

And in 24 hours after the tweet went viral, we launched an emergency petition and an emergency appeal complimented by a range of assets including an email to supporters and a Q&A to equip our social media moderators.

Launching an emergency petition and appeal this quickly is something that we had not done at WWF UK before, so to turn this around in lightning speed was incredible. If we hadn’t acted as quickly as we did, we would have risked losing supporter interest when they were primed and ready to help one of the most beautiful places on the planet!

No matter what crisis you are in, pulling together a team of relevant members of staff and identifying urgent priorities should always be the first step.

How do you navigate unrealistic expectations or requests from colleagues who might not necessarily have the strongest grasp on social?

Our team are solution orientated. It’s very rarely a no to requests — it’s a ‘no, but have you thought of…’.

It’s also about education. We want our staff to be more active on social media and have an interest in the success of our organisation’s channels. We run regular workshops with teams on helping them understand our organic social media channels, focusing a lot on what works and what doesn’t.

Providing examples of what hasn’t worked in the past is also a handy tactic — you can’t argue with data!

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a Social Media Manager with limited resources?

Write up a channel vision. No need for a long document — it just needs to detail why people should follow you, the themes you will focus on, and the content you’ll use to bring these themes to life.

It may sound like a boring process, but it’s a useful exercise that can help bring clarity to what you’re trying to achieve and how you will succeed. You’ll also end up creating a brilliant resource to share with other people so they too can become invested and passionate about your vision.

And last but not least, what’s one of your favourite accounts to follow on Twitter (or Instagram), and why?

Keeping within the charity space, I’d have to say RNLI. They are brilliant storytellers and their consistency of sharing footage from their volunteers in action helps me feel connected to the cause, despite not living anywhere near the sea!

They also have the right balance of sharing their own content and amplifying the voices of their local offices and supporters — something which we plan to do more of at WWF UK.

A big thank you to Nicola for these great tips. If you do have any questions feel free to reach out to the Social Misfits Media team at info@socialmisfitsmedia.com.