The Art & Science of Social Media Strategy Cayden Mak (@cayden), New Media Director at 18MillionRising

@18MillionRising

Launched in Sept. 2012 doing civic engagement online.

Over 80 partners, from community organizations like Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC) to Angry Asian Man.

Did the online voter registration thing, but tried some other stuff too.

Social media pivot: moving away from traditional online organizing and into some funky viral media organizing.

• Launch petition-based campaigns. • Build an email list. • Use that email list to support further

petition-based campaigns. • Be able to email like 400,000 people

about terrible stuff. • ??? • PROFIT

• Read Facebook and Twitter all day. • Build a fan base. • Give that fan base awesome content to

share with their friends. • Be able to reach like 1,000,000 eyeballs

about terrible stuff. • ??? • PROFIT

Many people have assumptions about social media and how it fits into the rest of their work. Here are mine*:

1. Social media is a tool for, not a type of, activism. 2. Your base is on social media, whether or not you are. 3. Social media is not grunt work. 4. Building a social media presence is not an end in itself. 5. Building a social media presence can be a giant time-suck. 6. Building a social media presence can enhance and augment

existing goals and priorities. 7. Organizing using social media shares some key characteristics with

organizing offline.

* Not uncontroversial. But they seem to be working.

• Like offline organizing, your main goal is to find, and mobilize, a base.

• You can find your base where they work, live, and play.

• Like life AFK, online life is full of distractions.

• Online organizing means building relationships of trust, then expanding that network of trust.

• Online organizing can also be showing up for your allies online.

To think strategically, you need to identify a couple of things before you get started.

1. Who’s your base?

2. What are your goals? (N.B.: I’m not talking about metrics here.)

3. What are the right tools for the job?

4. What kind of really cool stuff do you plan to put on the internet?

You wanna be where the people are.

Like it or not, they’re (mostly) on Facebook.

According to Quantcast (one of my favorite dorky websites), Facebook is the #4 most popular site in the U.S., with nearly 128 million unique visitors a month. Twitter is #6 with nearly 86 million unique visitors a month.

But this also isn’t just a sheer numbers game.

Get specific about who your base is and finding people gets easier.

Young: 18-35; Technically savvy: they get the net;

Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders, who: already might have some inclination to progressive politics, but

want to get involved in a way that feels fresh and is smart, funny, and critically incisive.

Goals for social media strategy planning should:

1. Serve your organization’s broader goals;

2. Draw on the strengths of social media in particular;

3. Be translatable into meaningful metrics.

Provoke ideas, inspire action, and

connect people online through dynamic social media campaigns that help

young AAPIs realize their power and develop a political identity.

Fun Fact: 71% of internet-using American adults use Facebook.

Other Fun Fact: around 20% of internet-using American adults use Twitter.

• Being strategic about your tool choice will probably mean getting

on Facebook and keeping up with it, but depending on your needs you might also want to create accounts elsewhere.

• You don’t want to let any of these lag: idle accounts might look worse than none at all.

• We learned from Quantcast early on that Tumblr’s user base skews young (14-25) and Asian & Latinx, so we created a Tumblr.

Bottom line: your tools should be informed by your base.

Whether or not you believe this man,

Facebook does give you the opportunity to reach a

lot of people you might not normally.

• Over a billion users. • Represents 25% of all U.S. pageviews. • Governed by a secret (possibly evil) algorithm, which changes

constantly but can totally be gamed for your own purposes.

PRO TIP: keep up with algorithm changes at http://newsroom.fb.com

The common narrative about viral stuff on the internet is that it just happens: people find stuff they like, they share it, their friends like it, they share it, and so forth. Fact: luck has a lot to do with it, but that’s only part of the story.

It likes: • Stuff a critical mass of

people have already liked, commented on, or shared.

• Visually interesting content.

• Links to pages that users stay on instead of clicking away.

• Short-ish, informative headlines.

It dislikes: • Stuff that has already been

shared a bunch over time, like classic memes.

• Images that are predominantly text.

• Links that people click and don’t stay to look at.

• Explicit asks to like and share.

Anger

Sadness

Empowerment Despair

IDK what even goes here. Healthcare fundraisers, maybe.

Fact: it’s really not likely that things are going to go viral by themselves, even if they’re totally kickass and awesome.

If you write 25 headlines, chances are tons of them will be shit. But at least

one of them will be gold. The way you figure out which things are most likely to be gold than others is a combo of knowing what works generally and A/B testing to find out what your extended audience likes. PRO TIP: most of the time, you’ll miss. Don’t give up! (You can still be adorable while you miss.)

Don’t give everything away. Let the headline and image tell the story. Don’t tell your audience what to feel or think. They hate condescension. Hit the right emotional register: don’t bum people out. Don’t oversexualize: everyone and their mom is on Facebook, literally. Don’t over-think. 95% of what you write won’t go viral. It’s not personal. Remember this is hard as fuck. Keep writing, testing, and posting. Don’t drop so many f-bombs. Be clever. But not obtuse, confusing, or irritatingly ironic.

Easy (not-so-viral)

Hard (totally fucking viral)

Getting your audience to like.

Getting your audience to share.

Getting your audience’s friends to like.

Getting your audience’s friends to share.

Getting your audience’s friends’ friends to like.

Getting George Takei to like & share.

“Virality” is really a way of understanding a tipping point in your metrics. Especially on Facebook, a key metric is the number of people who shared your post: it indicates the highest level of engagement and identification with a post. Understanding your baseline performance means you can understand what it means to over- or under-perform. There is not a fixed number that will represent what over- or under-performance is; setting baselines is critical. Your baselines will shift as you get better at creating and editorializing content for your core audience. Over-performance also means that you’ve struck a vein of gold in terms of messaging: you have something that vibes right with your base.

You can develop best practices on almost any social media platform by creating baselines, testing, and assessing outcomes.

Everyone is sharing everyone else’s awesome stuff. Where do you get your information and news? Who are supernodes in your network? Who are up-and-comers in your network? PRO TIP: always give credit where credit is due. Even if we’re talking about a macaque selfie.

• Use large, high-quality images.

• Don’t make an image that’s just text: text should be 30% or less.

• Check out current element dimensions for Facebook Pages.

• Develop a visual identity, because if you are making cool stuff, people are going to share it around.

PRO TIPS: I create images using Inkscape and GIMP, completely free and open-source software. Check out https://www.facebook.com/PagesSizesDimensions for current element dimensions.

Twitter is the internet’s front porch.

Twitter is about speed and density. • Most Twitter users have a couple dozen followers; seek out

supernodes who can retweet you to a couple thousand. • Participate in real-time events, like townhalls, or livetweeting

direct actions or the State of the Union address. • Use Twitter to break stories before anyone else: lots of journalists

use Twitter to find their next pitch. • Don’t let your Twitter account idle: time is of the essence.

Generosity on Twitter will get you far.

• Retweeting is great. Just make sure it’s not your entire feed. • Tag people and orgs you’re talking about in your Tweets. • Build one-to-one relationships with your base on Twitter. This is

the platform for conversation!

• Make sure everyone’s seeing your Tweets: if you start a Tweet with a mention (@18millionrising), put a period before it. Otherwise it’ll get buried.

• You can schedule Tweets using a third-party app, like Tweetdeck or HootSuite.

• If you want to start a hashtag (#HandsUpDontShoot) campaign, pick just one hashtag: you only have 140 characters per Tweet and a single hashtag makes it easier for users to find, and follow, the conversation.

• You can share the same thing multiple times, because Twitter moves so fast that the majority of your followers won’t catch your content if you share it just once.

Building an audience on social media is only as useful as you make it. What are you going to leverage your audience for?

What are you preparing them to do beyond like and share?

Stay in Touch @cayden facebook.com/cayden.mak bodywithout.org Check Out Our Work @18MillionRising facebook.com/18MillionRising.org 18millionrising.org