CASE STUDY: Getting Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury on Twitter

Every social media platform is different, with different purposes and reach.

Facebook is great for staying connected with people and organizations you’ve already got a relationship with. Instagram is a very visual platform, great for showing off image-based materials, be it portfolio or photos. LinkedIn, job hunting and professional relationships. Pinterest is one great big scrapbook, though by all indications some resourceful folks have been quite innovative with it. Tumblr‘s a bit of hodgepodge that I don’t fully have a grasp on. And Twitter… a massive torrent of short bursts of info, great for putting you in contact with people you don’t currently know, but not so great for staying in touch with those you do.

Couple them together, and you can have a really powerful way to connect to your public and stay connected – virtually “meet” strangers through Twitter or Instagram, and keep them in the loop through Facebook.

A lot of us, myself included, will tend to pick a platform that works for us, and without any specific incentive to branch out, will stick with it, be it the photo sharing of Instagram or the status updates of Facebook. This can work great for a while, but it can often get you to the point where all you’re doing is preaching to the converted, with increasingly diminishing returns – they may still be your “Friends”, but they may not be truly paying attention anymore, and with no steady influx of new contacts, your reach gets a little smaller every day.

BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS OF GREATER SUDBURY

The agency and I began to explore that possibility a few months ago. They’re very active on Facebook, and quite good at using it, but haven’t branched out into the other social media platforms. When we noticed that the promotional graphics we were posting weren’t seeing the same level of sharing that they had in recent years, it was a very strong indicator that it we may have reached audience saturation, and it was time to open things up a bit.

Enter Twitter. Which they weren’t active on. Actually, they weren’t on it at all.

Me personally, I’d been on Twitter since 2008, but had never taken much interest in it until earlier this year. After three months of learning the ins and outs (and there’s still a good ways to go), I was now in a position to help them stake out their own digital positioning. There was actually an upside to them not having had a presence till now – we could start fresh with a solid strategy, and hit the ground running without any brand baggage on the platform.

I’d learned a few lessons from my own ventures. My own scattershot approach had yielded a lot of followers (2300 in about 3 months), but a pretty shallow level of interaction. Because I post about screenwriting, design, art, business, career and various things that strike my fancy, my personal brand isn’t as strong as it could be if I were just posting about design. Or illustration. Or screenwriting. But, for me, my Twitter account is reflecting who I am… a designer, a screenwriter and an illustrator. I’ve got my fingers in a lot of pies, and in reflecting that, I’m no real authority on any of them.

It didn’t have to be that way with Big Brothers Big Sisters, though. They’re all about the kids. Sure, they’re ranging from 6 to 16, but they’ve got a strong brand that calls for a very strong focus as far as Tweeting topics go. Luckily, there’s a lot of ground to cover there.

FIRST UP – CREATE THE ACCOUNT

Fairly simple to create. Twitter hasn’t made it difficult there.

Customization is easy – BBBS has some pretty clearly defined colours, as well as resource material available to the agencies on the National site. I’ve spent so long working on materials for them that I have a fair feel for the corporate ID. Plus, I’ve got all the logos and fonts, so establishing the visual brand isn’t hard.

SECOND – THE APPROACH

We’re going with the one-in-five rule with this one. Using a scheduling program (in this case Hootsuite), we’ll be setting up for five scheduled tweets a day. This won’t include any additional stuff they decide to share as they come across it. This will simply be the baseline. Five tweets a day.

And only one of them will be about Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury. The remaining four will be informational links.

THE FOUR-IN-FIVE

The first thing I started with was exploring what those four-in-five posts could be. I started with a few specific resources they could explore, but it quickly turned into general Google searches – pick a topic, do the Google, and pick one of the ten articles that show up on the search page as a potential topic to tweet.

THE TARGET AUDIENCES

Generally, there’s three:

• Parents of youths in the program
• Mentors of youths in the program
• Youths in the program

That’s not to say that there won’t be other interested parties, like the potential business sponsors we’re hoping to establish connections with… but for now, those three cover the brand. And they’re really all focused on the youths… it’s just the perspectives that may be changing from tweet to tweet.

WHAT TO TWEET?

The topics range from fairly fluffy to pretty gut-punching serious. It’s a serious world out there for kids growing up. The feed should at least partially reflect that.

• Ways To Entertain Kids
• Getting Teens To Talk
• Exercise Tips For Single Moms
• Motivate Kids to Exercise
• Kids and Science
• Kids and Art
• Kids and Music
• Kids and Sports
• Kids and Homework
• Being a Good Mentor
• Big Brother Big Sister Time Commitment
• Big Brother Big Sister Free Activities
• Does my child need a mentor?
• Child Acting Out at School
• Child Behavioral Issues
• Dealing With Child Shoplifting
• Effective Discipline Children
• Kids and Nutrition
• Kids and Pets
• Teens and Bullying
• “The Talk” – sex-Ed Discussions With Your Teen
• Kids and the Internet
• Teens and addiction
• Teens and smoking
• Teens and drinking
• Teens and drugs
• Puberty and what to expect
• Kids and mental illness
• Social media and addiction
• Social media dangers
• Understanding your LGBTQ teen
• Teens and anorexia
• Teens and bulimia
• Childhood diabetes
• Kids/teens and obesity
• Teens and peer pressure
• Kids/teens and sexual abuse
• Teens and body-shaming
• Teens and sex-shaming
• Signs of abuse
• Challenges of single-parent homes
• Effects of parental absenteeism
• Teens and self-esteem
• Allergies
• Lactose intolerance
• Gluten intolerance
• Kids and the loss of a loved one
• Kids and the loss of a pet
• Teens and suicide
• Suicide warning signs
• Warning signs youths are at-risk

Straight Google searches will pull up dozens of quality articles on each topic, and the alternative searches Google presents on each search page will also send the agency in other directions for finding quality articles to post.

This is hardly exhaustive, of course… and it’s just what I came up with on my own in a late-night brainstorming session. Certainly the caseworkers and executive director, some of whom are parents themselves, will be able to dig into their life experience with their Littles and own children, to find more stuff to tweet.

THE ONE-IN-FIVE

It’s a truism regarding social media that you can’t make it all about yourself. Accounts that only self-promote generally get tuned out as spammers or too self-absorbed to offer anything of value. That being said, you can’t simply be a mindless retweeter or link poster either. To use a fishing analogy, you use your educational links and retweets to attract them and lure them in, and you post your own material to reel them in.

Build up a following of folks who are interested and have use for the educational materials you’re posting, and then you give them targeted calls to action that they’ll hopefully be more inclined to act on.

The BBBS Sudbury website has a collection of articles on mentoring and volunteering. The one-in-five can occasionally be one of those, sending folks back to the official site.

The agency has a number of sponsors: Manulife, Ruby Lougheed Yawney, Laird Constructors, Collins Barrow, Weston Bakery, Yes We Do Coffee, Sudbury Kinsmen, Weston Bakery, Surface Design and Décor Floors First, RecordXPress.

Interspersed in the one-in-five could be “Special thanks to <sponsor name here>”, with a logo for the image, maybe a shot or two from their website, and a link to the site itself. And some sponsors, like the Kinsmen, have an annual house raffle – certainly posts can be thrown their way with their web ads. It will certainly add to the perceived value of sponsoring BBBS to get those shout-outs from time to time, and may make all the difference in attracting additional sponsors.

They’ve got a “global ambassador”, Sudbury country singer Larry Berrio, who gives them a lot of time and effort. Certainly shout-outs like “Many thanks to @LarryBerrio, for all you do” will both build up additional goodwill, but also get BBBS on his followers’ radar, which may amount to additional followers and opportunities to the agency as well.

They’ve got other vendors too, who offer them a lot of support as well. Myself included. If I were truly modest, I wouldn’t urge it, but really, modesty doesn’t get anyone anywhere here on the net, and staying invisible for the sake of not wanting to appear self-promotional gets you nothing for your (lack of) efforts. Besides, I know them, and they would give me the occasional shout-out anyways. So, yeah… “Thanks to our graphic designer, @GeoffMorton, who’s always there when we need him”, with a couple of my campaign posters attached. Shows off my work (yay for me!), and it gets them on the radar of my own followers… and also shows that they have professional marketing materials at their disposal, which can only help when it comes to attracting new sponsors who will want to know that their sponsorship dollars are going to an agency that takes their marketing efforts seriously.

THE LOCAL MEDIA

This is a goldmine of opportunity. With local radio stations like KICX or HOT, there are chances to send tweets their way – “Hey @kickx917, the girls in the office are in the mood for the Dixie Chicks… any chance of?”

Get that kind of playful going back and forth with the media twitterers, and you get yourself on the radar of a lot of people who might not have heard of you otherwise.

TRENDING

Are there events going on in the world that impact children, and perhaps specifically at-risk children? Certainly. The news emerging recently has Sesame Street moving over to HBO from PBS for its first-run episodes – this is huge. A television program that from its inception been there for lower income children, to help further their early education, is instead being given to affluent children. This is something the agency could get in on the conversation with.

FUN STUFF

The agency could create a YouTube account and create “Office Playlists”, music that they’re listening to in the office. Send out a tweet to the followers with a link to it, with a call to action – “Any suggestions for tunes we could add to the playlist?”, and you’ve got the opportunity for an emergent back-and-forth with the followers. As long as you don’t look like you’re spending too much time creating YouTube playlists, it should be okay.

THE ONGOING OPPORTUNITIES

Everything listed till now are the things you can plan ahead to get in the Hootsuite Auto-Schedule feed. But Twitter isn’t static, and a feed that’s only posting without interacting is missing out on massive opportunities.

So, you keep an eye out for local hashtag opportunities, be it #SudburyWolvesHockey or #JunctionCreekCleanup. If you can find organic ways to work  yourselves into these conversations (without looking too much like you’re just jumping into them for self-promotional reasons), you can attract quality attention and increase your reach.

Plus, there are things that will emerge as opportunities, but only if you’re paying attention. Is someone continually retweeting your links? If they’re not a follower, they probably would be if you followed them first. If they are, you may well have an “in” with them. They’re already tuned in to your feed, they may be open to more, if you approach it properly.

But let these things develop organically. Just because someone’s retweeting your articles doesn’t mean they’re going to respond positively to “Hey, will you volunteer for us?”, but a casual tweet that turns into a conversation could very well turn into an offer from them.

RETWEETING AND FAVOURITING – MORE OPPORTUNITIES

People like getting retweeted, for a number of reasons. One, it actually lets them know that people are finding some value in their posts. It lets them know that a particular other Twitterer is paying attention. It gets them exposed to not just their audience but yours as well. Favourites are a little less useful, in that nobody else is getting to see your tweet, but it is letting you know that it’s being read.

So when someone new gives you a follow, give their feed a quick look and see if there isn’t something of value that you can retweet. If someone gives you a mention, why not Favourite it? Let them know it’s appreciated.

Relationships can build on those two simple little actions. Whole articles have been written about the value of Retweets and Favourites. I’m not going to bloat this post by getting into everything. But suffice it to say that Retweeting and Favouriting can open up whole new avenues for your connections and reach. Be generous with them, as long as what you’re retweeting fits in with your personal brand.

HOOTSUITE

I learned early, you don’t want to be tied to Twitter for every post. And you don’t want to have them all bunching up for the moments you have to post them. So, you use scheduling management software… like Hootsuite (there are more, but it’s the one I use).

I’ve come to trust Hootsuite to simply Auto-schedule my ahead-of-time posts. I’m guessing it’s using some sort of algorithm that knows what posts goes best when, though there may be some randomness to it as well.

Multiple tweeting is also key. I rarely just post one tweet once. Once I started paying attention to the Twitter Analytics, I got a real sense for how many times any given tweet was showing up in feeds, and really, the number of people who’re seeing any feed are astonishingly small. A very small percentage of your followers will notice it, so it’s perfectly fine to post it more than once. Some articles I post up to four times.

Of course, if you’re auto-posting multiple times, Hootsuite may well go and bunch them all together, so you’ll want to use its editing feature and move the duplicates around. Space them out by a couple days and you’ll probably avoid overlap.

ANALYTICS

There’s a lot of valuable information in the analytics. While it’s a decent enough ego boost to see how many impressions, visits, retweets or whatever that you’re getting, it’s got functionally important info as well. Being able to see in front of you which of your posts actually got clicked on, or which got ignored, can tell you a lot about where your efforts may be best served, or have the most growth potential.

Analytics is a science all to itself, and I myself don’t have a full grasp on its value. Suffice it to say, it’ll be well worth the agency’s time to learn about it and see how they’ll get the best community outreach for their efforts.

SAMPLE TWEET SCHEDULE

Day 1

1. Science Games For Kids
   http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/gamesactivities.html
2. 10 Ways to Be a Good Mentor
   (http://www.blueskycoaching.com.au/pdf/v4i10_mentor.pdf
3. Why is My Child Shoplifting and What Can I Do?
   http://www.empoweringparents.com/Shoplifting-Stealing-and-Stealing-with-Aggression.php
4. Special thanks to the Kinsmen of Sudbury for all their support.
   http://www.sudburykinsmen.ca/
5. Dealing with Bullying
   http://kidshealth.org/teen/school_jobs/bullying/bullies.html
6. Ten tips for Parents of an LGBT Child
   http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/parents/173-parents
7. Teens and Peer Pressure
   http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/HealthTopicDetails.aspx?p=243&id=2184&np=295
8. Tried and True Tips to Fit a Workout into a Busy Mom’s Day
   http://www.workingmother.com/blogs/real-life-tips-workout-success/tried-and-true-tips-fit-workout-busy-mom039s-day

Day 2

1. How to Talk To Teenagers Who Don’t Want to Talk To You
   http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/how-talk-teenagers-who-dont-want-talk-you
2. A shout-out to @GeoffMorton, our graphic designer. An ongoing thank you for all you do for us. (with a few campaign pics… yes, it’s a shameless plug on my part)
3. Why Art and Creativity Are Important
   http://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/development/intellectual/why-art-and-creativity-are-important/
4. What the Research Says about Kids and Homework
   http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/what-the-research-says-about-kids-and-homework/article570598/
5. The Value of Mentoring
   http://www.mentoring.org/about_mentor/value_of_mentoring
6. BBBS of Greater Sudbury will have a table at the Southridge Mall (date). Please drop in to see us.
7. Our global Ambassador Larry Berrio will be playing (location, date). If you go see him, say hi for us!
8. Behaviour Problems in Children and Adolescents
   http://www.kidsmentalhealth.ca/parents/behaviour.php

Day 3

1. 11 Facts about Teen Smoking
   https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-teen-smoking
2. Stresses of Single Parenting
   https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-dynamics/types-of-families/Pages/Stresses-of-Single-Parenting.aspx
3. Don’t Judge Challenge: Teens Declare War on Body Shaming by Making Themselves Up to ‘Look Ugly‘
   http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/dont-judge-challenge-teens-declare-6010468
4. Warning Signs of Youth Violence
   http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/warning-signs.aspx
5. Check Out Our YouTube Playlist. We know, a lot of Shania Twain. Any suggestions?
6. Activity Ideas for Big and Little Sisters
   http://www.bigsisters.bc.ca/site-bbbs/media/BCLowerMainland/Activity_Ideas.pdf
7. The Benefits of Music Education
   http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music-arts/the-benefits-of-music-education/
8. BBBS Volunteer Says Time Commitment Small Compared to Impact on Teen’s Life
   http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/7everyday-hero/big-brothers-big-sisters-volunteer-says-time-commitment-small-compared-to-impact-on-teens-life

Day 4

1. Age-by-Age Guide to Talking to Kids about Sex
   http://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/age-by-age-guide-to-talking-to-kids-about-sex/
2. Internet Addiction: What Can Parents Do?
   http://www.webroot.com/ca/en/home/resources/tips/ethics-and-legal/family-internet-addiction-what-can-parents-do
3. Does Your Teen Need A Mentor?
   http://www.thrivingfamily.ca/Family/Stages/Teen%20phases/2010/jan/teen-mentor.aspx
4. Kudos to Weston Bakery for their continued support (include photo of big cheque from last fundraiser)
5. 11 Facts About Teens and Self-Esteem
   https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-teens-and-self-esteem
6. Helping Your Child When the Family Pet Dies
   https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/pet-loss/helping-your-child-when-the-family-pet-dies
7. The Best Time to Get Your Kids a Pet
   http://www.sheknows.com/pets-and-animals/articles/1008605/the-best-time-to-get-your-kids-a-pet
8. Girls and Puberty: What To Expect
   http://teens.webmd.com/girls/facts-about-puberty-girls

Day 5

1. Eating Disorders in Children and Teens
   http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/eating-disorders/features/eating-disorders-children-teens
2. Nutrition For Kids: Guidelines for a Healthy Diet
   http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/childrens-health/in-depth/nutrition-for-kids/art-20049335
3. Match Activities for Big/Little Outings
   http://www.bbbs.org/site/c.leJNIVOvElH/b.6030493/k.6741/Match_Activity_Ideas.htm
4. Science Experiments For Kids
   http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/experiments.html
5. 12 Tips to Get Your Couch Potato Kid Moving
   http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/kid-fitness-when-your-child-wont-exercise
6. Fun motivational web graphic
7. Top 25 Mentoring Relationships Represented In Film
   (include some photos of Luke and Yoda, Dumbledore and Harry to attract attention)
   http://www.mentoring.org/latest_news/latest_general_news/top_25_mentoring_relationships_represented_in_film
8. “A big thank you to all our supporters, be it time, money or whatever. We couldn’t do it without you.”

—-

Certainly, this was created as an overview of the approach I’m taking to help get Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury active on Twitter, to help them increase their community reach, fundraising and volunteerism levels. Of course, that doesn’t even get into how important it’ll be for them to start generating their own content – a blog. But that’s a conversation for another day. One thing at a time.

But, if you’re reading, and even if you’re not them, I hope you can find some value in it. Whether you’re a new Twitterer just trying to figure out how to brand yourself, another nonprofit looking to chart a path or even another BBBS agency altogether, I hope you get something out of this.

And if that be the case, feel free to steal any and all of the links, by the way… my gift to the community at large.

Geoff

P.S. I’ll be returning to this topic in a few weeks to take a look at how the launch of the Twitter page went, what sort of progress we’re making and any other informational goodies that are fit to print. Feel free to sign up for “Email Notifs” on the right if you want to be notified when the follow-up’s ready.