One of our responsibilities as Public Relations officers is to maintain the club Facebook page, generate positive awareness and convertible leads for the purpose of attracting and retaining members. Today 2.23 billion people log in to the platform every month, meaning Facebook is still the world’s biggest social media platform. According to a recent article by Hootsuite “Facebook is the second-most popular website, globally. (After, of course, Google.) Worldwide, 1.47 billion people log in daily”
To get your message across this kind of an audience is every PR officer’s ultimate dream. Whilst we would all love to speak to the billions of people on Facebook and create engaging content that lures them to our page, the first secret to successful marketing is niching. A niched audience is a small market segment, this could be your immediate community, or members of your organization you want to help join your toastmasters club.
As the Club Vice President of Public Relations your audience target is simple. The people who will visit your club are individuals who are close in terms of distance and have an interest in developing themselves. Once you have identified your audience, you start designing and creating consistent content to encourage interaction and possibly club visits. This is where it gets tricky for a lot of people, the creation of consistent and “brandright” content. I totally get! Life gets busy and trying to consistently post can become a drag, however there are many tools on facebook you can utilise to make life easy for you, and create more time for yourself to do other things?
Have no fear! The Digital PR Ninja is here to the rescue (Of course not me! but the guy who taught me all this J he’s the one doing all the rescuing) By using the Facebook planning tool, You manage to schedule my posts 3 months ahead and only need to do the bare minimum to maintain our club page.
First things first, I got familiar with the branding rules of Toastmasters International, to understand what I am allowed to do in regards to how crazy creative I can get. Once you understand the guidelines around this, you may go ahead and follow the next steps.
Step 1
Collect all club event pictures or Visit Toastmasters.org and download all the picture resources or download all pictures the District Team has been taking for you (Yes all files! Just trust me on this one) these are under resources, labelled “head shots, club meetings, on Facebook groups etc…)
Step 2
Create a standard PowerPoint template. Consistency is key, if you want your page audience to always quickly identify your posters even when they see them on a different page. With a standard template, all you need to do is change the date times of the meetings, and picture (Hence you need to download a lot of pictures) And lucky for you we have a VPPR Toolkit to choose lots of different template designs that suit you!
Step 3
Create a lot of these posters in one go. I advise taking a day or two on a weekend you’re free. Go to your Facebook page and schedule them to go off on the day of your meetings. Here is a snippet of my posts schedule for March. Our club CIS Toastmasters only meets twice a month, a week before our meeting our page releases a reminder to our members, and on the week of a meeting another poster to encourage guests them to visit. All we had to do is schedule the posts, and Facebook will automatically allow their release on the day you scheduled them to go off.
And walla! You have created content for the next 3 months. Freeing all this time, gives you time to focus on the enquiries in your inbox, send prompt responses to the comments on your posts and follow up on the other platforms your club maintains. I would love to hear how your club maintains their page and if you have any tricks and tools you know that we can add, please connect with me on Facebook @Enkromelle. I look forward to hearing all your brilliant ideas.