What is the best way for Transition Initiatives to use Facebook and Twitter?
Hi all
I just wondered how successfully any groups had used Facebook or Twitter to promote their initiatives and to get a bigger public presence within their geographical communities?
Can we begin to share some experiences of what has worked and what has not?
I guess experiences differ depending on the ages of those active in the Transition group. We are a rural community and the group so far is made up of in the main 30- 65 year olds. We have recently set up a Transition Matlock UK facebook site, and i have put a link to facebook on our website homepage, http://www.transitionmatlock.org.uk/ but so far a handful of existing members who use facebook have joined and the rest who have joined our page are welcome but don't seem to live in our town.
What type of facebook site works best for transition initiatives?
We have set up as a page (as a not for profit business) rather than pretending to be a person, as a result i can not post videos and other campaign stuff to our Transition Matlock page as i can to my own personal facebook page... I am also not sure i like the fact that everyone who comes to the Transition Matlock site can then look at my own personal facebook site and see what daft comments my very large family have been making.....
I have been posting details of our meetings on our facebook page, and of Green Drinks, and i have "liked" other relevant organisations, businesses, etc in our town so they might come by and visit our site....what else can i do to get more people and hopefully younger people to find our facebook page and see what we are doing?
It has been suggested that we might be better of just using twitter rather than facebook, has anyone used twitter successfully to promote their group?
any advice or tales of success of failure using these media welcome...
thanks
helen
Twitter can be good for networking and connecting. It's worth using specific hashtags in your tweets so they turn up on searches - probably both for transition and for your locality. #transition for example pulls up a lot of irrelevant tweets so maybe there is something better, #transitiontown is good but perhaps too long! #peakoil also gets some useful tweets.
hope that's some help...
When messaging in twitter try to include what people may search for in your area , eg,
"Tasty Local Food meeting - event 7pm 2nite, Green Lion pub, Matlock www.tinyurl.com"
There are quite a few possible searches from this including "Local Food Matlock" and "Green Lion Matlock" and "Matlock Pub" and "Matlock event" etc
...the reason I didn't include Transition in it is cuz it uses up to many letters, also... and try asking yourself "What are people interested in and doing in their everyday lives"? ...are your upcoming members gonna be most interested in Transition or local food? (there's little point advertising to attract your existing members).
Gently, gently, catchy new monkey!
HI
thanks for the twitter help - i must admit to being a twitter virgin.
Is there any way to find out what percentage / type of people are using twitter in any geographical location? I have asked our support group members and none of us (inc. me) have ever used twitter or know anyone who does!
is it used a lot by young people? i am willing to have a go and learn - i suppose i can learn how to do it (must admit i dont even have a mobile - but I do borrow OH's iphone when possible) I can't be harder than learning how to be a sheep farmer :) My transition reskilling gets more diverse by the day.
h
Locafollow can find Twitterers in your area
LocaFollow http://www.locafollow.com/
"Search Twitter users by keywords in their Bio and Location fields. Locate Twitter users that live in your city and create Twitter Lists."
I am https://twitter.com/sussexgardener
lists you could follow
Hey, Phil,
thanks for suggesting people follow my Transition list on Twitter!
I'd better be careful to keep it more up-to-date from now on!
I'm going to be attending the Transition Conference this year and will be helping to facilitate a Communications group session as well as possibly suggesting an informal session on social media too.
Anything people would like to see discussed in relation to social media?
Hello Helen,
I noticed your post through Twitter's @transitiontowns that I follow in the area of sustainability. I thought I'd share with you some pointers and my experience with Twitter.
First of all, I think you did well to separate yourself from this task and create an independent FB presence. I am more familiar with Twitter and here's what I know:
- follow people who inspire you
- follow your friends
- use lists to group them
- familiarize yourself with your favorite Twitter client (the PC program you use to read the tweets - I like twhirl but it's a matter of taste)
- use hashtags (words preceded by the sign # like #followfriday) to give a meaning to your tweet, to give a context (some of your followers might not know what you're tweeting about)
- on fridays there are tweets going around with #ff or #followfriday - it's a habit of the twitter community to recommend people to follow, so you can tweet a bunch of user names and finish with #ff indicating you recommend to follow these people
- avoid using auto-follow, think about who you follow and periodically check who follows you; it's not about large numbers
Beth Kanter is a lady specializing in the use of social for non-profits. She's herself a disciple of interesting people such as Valdis Krebs who advocate the power of organizational network analysis and she takes all this good stuff and puts it in simpler terms. Her blog is at http://www.bethkanter.org/ and her Twitter handle is @kanter.
As an example of Facebook presence, I thought of ColaLife. These guys had the clever idea to use the Coca-Cola distribution network and the shape of Coca-Cola packages to distribute medicine to developing countries by sliding appropriately shaped "AidPods" between bottles http://www.colalife.org/ - they use Facebook actively; might be worth checking out.
Finally, in terms of structuring your thoughts on the power of Twitter and Facebook to organize people around transition, there's David Cushman and his paper on communities of purpose which I strongly recommend. The power of Twitter to help your community quickly form small rings to address a question and dismantle once it's addressed...
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2008/04/communities-of-purpose-are-business.html
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2009/10/resources-everything-you-ever-wanted-to.html
While he's perhaps too focused on brands for your taste, his views and vision apply to a broad range of organizations - including social enterprise.
At the end of the day, you'll get followers on the page and on Twitter if you interact, provide some value/content and give it some love. I have just received my copy of Rob's Transition Handbook and can imagine that re-skilling has many facets which can be discussed and supported through social media before and after a training...
All the best!
JP
Thanks for this post Helen,
And a call for some stories if possible - Rob is writing one of the Transition Ingredients 'Becoming the Media' - and looking for good stories of using Facebook particularly - please can you share any Facebook stories you've got on this thread? They'd be massively appreciated and will go to make a great ingredient...
Thanks :)
Got a link to that "Becoming the media" pattern Ed?
Just searched for it on the site and it doesn't show up.
We removed the patterns as Rob has entirely re-written them, and they are now 'ingredients' and 'tools' - sorry - offline for a bit... back in a few weeks though :)
We use Twitter to alert members and other followers to events and news stories:
https://twitter.com/TransitionNewsC with links back to our website with the details. Seems to work well. We limit our tweets to a maximum of 2 per day and tend to limit its use to facts and information, rather how we are feeling right at this moment, which is what most tweets seem to be about.
We also started publishing a weekly (not daily, that is too intrusive) magazine based on Twitter:http://paper.li/TransitionNewsC
Hi Paul. Do you find that enough people use Twitter to make it worthwhile? Have people started using it because they see it as a useful resource? Did you have to do any persuading or educating of members to get them to use it?
Maybe I'll suggest it at our core group meeting tomorrow. I haven't done anything to stir things up for a few weeks!!
We have a Facebook page, but membership seems stuck at the number who joined when it was created.
Maybe I should have bought your barn and moved to Cornwall!!
Hi John, I can't believe its you, in those shades!
Originally I used twitter simply to monitor the publication of new articles about PO and Transition. Now we use Twitter as a quick and easy means of announcing events and other stories added to the TransitionNC website. Mind you, of our 900 odd members so far just 78 are followers on Twitter, so not fantastic.
Yes, you should have! I know it wasn't entirely ideal, but it would have been great to be neighbours. Still, good luck in Wales!
We've only got a couple of hundred on our mailing list. I'll suggest it and see what happens. I've just updated the event calendar on our web site to use Google Calendar, so it's easy to embed it in other sites too, but haven't tried using it to send e-mail notifications yet, as it's not possible to send automated e-mails to the current mailing list. A Twitter reminder might help.
If you saw the whole picture you'd recognise me by the four legged hairy animal, who causes chaos wherever he goes!
Twitter is also useful as a means of collecting news and event stories from several sources and publishing these in the form of a paper. Our is here http://paper.li/TransitionNewsC/weekend-magazine
We have decided not to go for the daily version, that everyone seems to use, including Transitionnetwork, but accumulate stories over seven day period and publish on Friday as a weekend magazine. That results in a much more interesting publication, which people find quite useful to catch up with developments. As an example, our last issue contained some 188 articles.
Feel free to look at it and subscribe, it is free after all!
We use the 'Transition Towns' Twitter identity to post some stuff we wouldn't put on the site, and 'Re-tweet' Initiatives news to help them spread the word as well.
We also have a Facebook page (which we're trying to embed the twitter feed into and our Youtube channel) for a bit of that social networking magic.
Both are easy to use and we share them with non-staff members so it's fair and balanced.
I've recently added Twitter and Facebook buttons to our website ( http://transitionfinsburypark.org.uk/ ) - about a month ago. I kind of did it cowboy style but luckily it works. At some point they're bound to merge as the status thing on FB is the same as the Twitter tweet.
We've had a FB 'group' page for a while, but the issue is (as with all the promotion) finding someone to add event and photos etc. It seems to be easier for a group of individuals to update a FB page than Twitter, but I might be missing a trick. FB is undoubtedly a good way of extending the net as there's quite a few group members who aren't on our mailing list. One of our volunteers wanted to set up a FB 'community' page but it's not nearly so useful.
The Twitter volume is growing gradually. I'm still struggling with what kind of tweet to put. People seem to have been picking up on both the personal and solely transition related tweets.
I've embedded our Twitter feed (@ttkingston) into our TTK Facebook group, using RSS Graffiti, which I found fairly self-explanatory, for the reasonably tech savvy. It works for Facebook "pages" too, as I've done the same for @DarkOptimism and my Facebook page.
And we also try to share around Twitter duties as widely as possible - I think volume and diversity is good, doesn't matter too much whether they're event notifications or "nice weather today" :)
Thanks for this, Shaun. Got there in the end. Getting the RSS feed from Twitter is now slightly harder - you have to 'switch to old twitter' and then copy the link location from the RSS feed icon.
ooh very handy. well done all. i might try this on the TN FB page, but as we do daily 'newspapers' from the initaitives list, it might swamp the FB updates... hmmm
I've started helping with a FaceBook page for our local Transition Group (in Newcastle, Australia) and doing a blog (focusing on sustainability and community engagement). Our FaceBook page has 54 friends and my blog averages around 12 hits a day. I'm not on twitter.
I'm torn about whether it is the best use of my time. It takes quite a bit of time keeping it upto date and I sometimes wonder if it is all worth it. I think the FB page is attracting a few new people and keeps people informed.
I'm afraid I can't help with suggestions about what works well. I can recommend an interesting online resource on using social media - socialbysocial.
Graeme
Transition Hobsons Bay set up a FB page for a project of ours (Newport Fruit & Veggie Swap) in about Oct last year. I just checked - 185 people 'like' us, whereas only 84 members get our monthly swap reminder email!
I'm not very tech-y on social media, but I think it has legs and its not much extra effort. (There's 3 administrators of our page.) I would consider setting up pages for other projects.
hi
Just to update on our progress - we still don't use twitter - getting a mobile phone is on my to do list ....
but our facebook site is working ok - i write a monthly transition matlock newsletter and a monthly Matlock Local Food News using Mailchimp - which is free as long as your database is under 2 thousand... and mailchimp automatically posts these newsletters on our facebook page...
i have found that quite a few small businesses (particularly food ones and renewable energy ones) have liked our facebook page and are now getting our newsletters fortnightly ... i have seen that the mailchimp newsletters on the facebook site are getting a lot of impressions even though our members who also have liked us on facebook (members are the minority of the likes) will already have received a private email with the newsletter ... so someone else probably is reading the newsletter via facebook... so if someone is reading i am happy as it is no extra work for mailchimp to post the newsletter on the facebook site... mailchimp would automatically tweet for us - but i have not got that far yet!
so my next aim is (once again ) to do twitter - but as someone who has resisted a phone for so long it is hard to change..... I am not sure of the statistics but i know i am a rare minority in the uk who does not do mobiles - although i do love my partners iphone and borrow it on occasions (like for Transition conference)
helen
For what it's worth, I use Twitter a lot, but not through any mobile device, only through my desktop computer. I don't want it following me around - not at all! :)
I live in crystal waters eco village and have developed a social net work content management system using www.socialgo.com
Www.crystalwaters.socialgo.com it is a great solution for project based activities management with magazine, events, video, music, photos...... It's free with basic parameters. Www.ning.comcould be considered a better service but you need to pay. It is also much easier to operate and manage than joomla.
The average age of our real community is about 55 with aprox 250 residents. The website community average age is about 45.we have about 50 members.
well i have finally set up a Transition Matlock twitter account and posted our first tweet....
nobody else on our support group / core membership used twitter or facebook so i have no idea if this is going to help us or not....
but i have started...
helen