Social Media Samples

How to Engage Your Community with Facebook and Twitter

Now that you’ve mastered the key messages and established your campaign, you’re ready to talk about your issue with a wider audience. But, what’s the best way to get the word out to a variety of various influential audiences? Social media is a great place to start. With just a few clicks, you can access the right people, build awareness and gain support to activate change in your community.

So, what are the most effective ways to use social media to support your cause? Let’s start by breaking down the Facebook and Twitter messages below.

Facebook

Facebook is a great way to reach more people, especially if you already have an established presence through your local organization’s page. You can use your existing account(s) to engage current advocates and recruit new ones, too. If you’ve established a campaign as an individual, consider launching a community Facebook page when your campaign takes off and community members show support.

Additional Notes for Facebook

• Images and videos attract more attention on social media because they serve as visual ways to tell a story, and they’re more fun to share. Keep these tips in mind if you choose to include them:
  • You can use the sample Facebook graphics included in this toolkit, but keep in mind that using the materials of others could cause copyright issues, so try to capture you own images, videos and graphics as well.
  • If you film or photograph members in your community, make sure you ask for permission and get a signed waiver before you post.
  • Think about the story you want to tell with the images you use and how it might inspire the people you want to reach.
  • Use people in your images that look like your community members.
• Want more people to see key posts? You can highlight posts by pinning them to the top of your page. To take this a step further, you can also promote your posts. There is a cost associated with promoting Facebook posts but this will get your posts to show up in the newsfeeds of the types of people you want to engage in your campaign.
• If you have a website or blog you want advocates to visit, make sure to include the link at the end of your post. Always give them a place where they can go to learn more, read an op-ed or join your movement.
• Personalize the posts by using facts specifically about your community instead of general facts.

Twitter

Twitter is a powerful platform because it uses short and informative messages, 280 characters each, to reach journalists, bloggers, news outlets, policymakers, parents, teachers and other key stakeholders in your local community.

Sample Posts for Twitter

Additional Notes for Twitter

• Consider starting a hashtag for your campaign. This way, supporters, media, legislators and all other audiences can easily follow along on your online journey.
• Remember that links take up space! If you want to track how many times people have clicked on your link, you can use a service like bitly.com. Otherwise, Twitter will automatically shorten your link via its own shortening service, making the link count for 23 characters.
• The good news is that media assets like photos, GIFs, polls, videos and quoted tweets no longer count toward your 280-character limit.
• Additionally, usernames no longer count toward the 280-character limit.
• Never start tweets with an @ symbol because then only you and the tagged user will see your tweet in newsfeeds! By placing any other character in front of @, the tweet is visible to a broader audience. You’ll notice that often, people begin their tweet with a period.
• Engage your legislators and/or community leaders through this platform. You can also provide this language to other community members so they can tweet at the same lawmaker in high volumes. This kind of message would be considered lobbying if you reference a specific proposed or pending piece of legislation, because using the legislator’s Twitter handle makes it a direct communication to that person.