Was this the year you were finally going to get serious about a social media strategy for your association, really serious? Like assigning real budget dollars to staff to do the work? Like charting your communication channels, setting a firm schedule, and mapping your successes and setbacks (that is, if you know how to measure those)? This task is very time consuming and valuable to your member communication, but it can’t be done without an additional budget.
In ten short years Facebook alone has gone from 20 million users to 2 billion. One of those billion joined in in just the last five years. There are 207 million users in the U.S. this year with that number climbing to 211 by 2022.
Should you be on FB or somewhere else? YouTube is the next most used platform with Whatsapp coming in third. Facebook owns Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, as you probably know. So, Mark Z knows pretty much everything about us. While monetizing his sites, he has annoyed Grandmas who just wanted to see the kids’ pictures. Even now, one must scroll through uninvited content sent because Mark knows what we like. He recently said he was rethinking the formula for its news feed to put an emphasis on posts from family and friends before brands and organizations.
What does that mean for associations? Well, besides revisiting our first paragraph, if you want your association posts to be seen by your members, you’ll not only need to get them to follow your profile, but to mark it as “see first.” Otherwise it’s possible your post will be so far down in the scroll, the event you thought you were announcing there could be unseen entirely.
