Planning your social media campaigns

The secret of any good communications is good planning. Whether you're using email, press releases or Faceboook you need to think about your goals and how you will achieve them. Who is your audience? What are the key messages? Who is going to do what? One way of managing this process is to use a communications campaign template, like the one available for download below.

This simple tool was shared as part of a workshop run by Mark Walker and Caroline Sutton in late November. 'Promoting your organisations using the press and social media' offered a number of top tips and insights to the 10 organisations who attended, including the use of press releases, a review of Facebook and a chance to put social media and PR in the wider communciations mix.

As Mark Walker explains, the best place to start are short mini-campaigns.

'Look ahead a couple of months, decide what you want to achieve and pick out an event or activity to plan towards. It could be that you want to attract people to your AGM or a community event, or start a big fundraising push. You may simply want to latch onto something seasonal and use it as an excuse to drive new users to your website. This simple planning tool gives you a single document to summarise your plans and start plotting how well they work.'

Mark's presentation materials from the workshop are available on slideshare, and the planning document is available to download below. Mark also handed out the ever-popular worksheet about 'What to do if you just don't GET Twitter', which is available elsewhere on the SCIP site.