Alex White

Campaigner | Unionist | Strategist

How to get members to talk about your union on social media

by

One of the regular questions I receive from unions is “how can I get members (or activists) to share our message on Facebook?” or “what will get members talking about the union on Facebook?”

Sound familiar?

Union organisers instinctively know that a positive “union experience” can be a powerful trigger to encourage word of mouth recommendations from members. Activists who participate in successful collective action, members who receive support and encouragement above and beyond from an organiser, supporters who see the impact of their actions at a mass rally.

Members, supporters and activists who have an amazing union experience will feel emboldened to recommend that others join and participate with the union.

It is a maxim of organising that members are the best recruiters of members. Personal recommendations from friends are more trusted than other kinds of promotions (such as advertising or news stories).

It is essential for unions to use those personal experiences from members, supporters and activists.

But how?

Create experiences where members can share a story

Union events, honestly, can be pretty boring sometimes. In fact, truthfully, they’re often boring. The result is that often members don’t want to talk about unions.

What they will talk about is where the union has positively impacted their lives.

Thinking hard about how members can have a union experience that impacts their lives is not easy.

For delegates, there’s a few things you can do. By making delegates feel special, and giving them something exclusive, you’re giving them something to talk about. Free is also good, so avoid asking delegates to pay for union activities like participation in conferences or for union merchandise. The benefits of the word-of-mouth from your delegates should be worth far more.

For members or supporters, a way to make them feel exclusive and special is by providing access to “insider” information. For example, giving members a sneak-peak behind the scenes of a campaign, or giving supporters access to union briefings about important issues.  While this isn’t as powerful as an experience, it can still help tap into positive feelings.

Look at other areas of your union activity. How can you emphasise these feelings in your interactions with members. Many unions do this through highlighting that the industrial advice members receive is an exclusive benefit of membership, not available to non-members.

Make your requests to your members clear (and up front)

Don’t presume that your members and supporters know that you want them to share or talk about your union. Not asking, or asking in a round-about way can simply cause confusion. If you want your members to do something, make it simple, doable and easy to achieve — and make it a single ask. Multiple requests can also cause confusion.

Unions often want members to share graphics or links on Facebook. However, your members will probably not want to share all your messages, graphics or links with their friends. This is why it’s incredibly important to make your messages and asks relevant — which means segmenting your requests.

It’s also important to make your message interesting enough that your members and supporters will want to talk about it with their friends.

Provide a strong call-to-action

Your ultimate goal is to get your supporters and members to share your content; your members’ goals on social media is much more complex: connecting with friends, being entertaining, sharing interesting links or photos, getting kudos or any number of other things.

What your members are unlikely to do is share something if your content is boring and if you don’t ask them.

Remember, you’re asking your member or supporter to advocate for your union or campaign. Make them feel like a star for doing so.

There are also ways to encourage your supporters to share with incentives. Lots of unions have merchandise and other goodies from campaigns, such as t-shirts, stickers and caps. Running competitions or using the campaign “chum” to encourage members to share, comment or like your updates is a simple but often effective way to get that engagement and sharing.

Five reasons your union should use Facebook Ads Power Editor

by

More and more unions are using Facebook to advertise, but chances are if you’re boosting your posts or advertising on newsfeeds, you’re using the standard “Self Serve” Facebook ad manager.

This is potentially a big mistake, and you could be wasting time and money.

I’ve long argued that social media and Facebook in particular is useful for unions because it can help identify and mobilise activists, engage members, and encourage people to become activists.

The key is that ultimately your social media campaigning needs to encourage real people to do real things in the real world.

Facebook advertising is increasingly an important part of the union social tool-kit.

This is especially the case because changes to the Facebook algorithm means that “organic reach” (that is, your union page posts appearing in fans’ newsfeeds) has been reduced. This is a decision by Facebook to encourage page-owners (like unions) to use advertising to reach their fans.

And an increasing number of unions are advertising on Facebook.

But most unions just click the “boost post” or “Get more Likes” button. This makes sense. The Self Serve ad manager in Facebook is easy to use, the default option, and for most union communicators and campaigners it is more or less intuitive.

Unfortunately, you’re not getting the real benefits of social advertising by using the default Self Serve manager, and you could actually be wasting your time and money chasing vanity metrics.

The Facebook Power Editor is what you should be using for all your Facebook ad creation.

The Power Editor is a special browser plugin that allows you to use all the advanced tools to create and manage ads.

I’ll be up front. Power Editor has a very steep learning curve, and it’s not particularly user friendly. It is more complicated to use than the Self Serve tool. But, if you’re starting to spendany money on promoting posts and advertising on Facebook, then you should dump the Self Serve tool and start using Power Editor.

Here’s five reasons why.

1. Targeting

The promise of advertising on Facebook is that it allows you to use the vast array of social and personal information that Facebook has, and let you target the most relevant audience possible. Using the Self Serve tool, you have some targeting options, but they’re actually relatively limited.

Power Editor’s targeting tools look very similar to the Self Serve, but are more granular.

I mentioned in an earlier post about Facebook’s custom audience feature. Power Editor lets you use that, and create “lookalike audiences“. Lookalike audiences let you create a target audience of completely new people who are likely to be interested in your union or its campaign because they’re similar to the custom list you’ve previously uploaded.

If you’re trying to grow your pool of potential new supporter leads, but have reached the limits of your existing custom audience, then the lookalike audience tool could help you grow.

Power Editor also lets you target people using “Partner Categories” — that is, categories of people managed by massive data-storage companies like Acxiom. While at first look this may appear useful only to for-profit businesses, it can be useful for unions’ political campaigns. For example, the AMWU could target “car buyers” in Victoria with ads about job losses at Ford and Holden, or the Fair Wear/TCFUA campaign could target “fashion-conscious” shoppers with ads about garment workers in Bangladesh.

Using the “Boost Post” button gives you almost no control over targeting. If you use Power Editor, you can focus your efforts on a much more specific, relevant audience.

2. Advanced Features

The Self Serve tool is a simple tool that makes advertising on Facebook easy and fast. As a result, the features are fairly limited; most of the advanced features are rolled out either to Power Editor, or to the API (which are used by third-party tools that you need to pay  for). While some of the advanced features eventually make it to the Self Serve tool, many do not.

I’ll be honest. The Power Editor is more complicated than the Self Serve tool. When you first start using it, there is a steep learning curve. But you really owe it to yourself, your members and your goal of winning your campaigns to use the advanced features that are available.

The list of features is changing regularly, so I’ll just list a few that are currently available when I’m writing this.

  • Custom Audiences (I’ve written about them here)
  • Lookalike Audiences (see the first reason above)
  • Saved Audiences (a real time-saver, lets you re-use audiences you’ve previously built)
  • Partner Categories (see the first reason above)
  • Conversion Tracking (this uses the pixel tracking, which I’ve touched on here)
  • Conversion Specs (this lets you optimise your ad bidding based specific objectives, such as clicks, web clicks, etc)
  • Domain Sponsored Stories (lets you promote when someone shares or likes a page on your website)

There are reasons that unions should be using every one of these advanced features. But the main one is improving your relevance and conversion rates.

3. Placement

Self Serve lets you create ads that appear in the side-bar or the newsfeed, but it’s still fairly limited. Power Editor gives you far more control over where your ads will appear and on what kind of device (e.g. desktop or mobile).

One of the major items in recent news is the Facebook sales revenue, which has jumped largely on the back of mobile ads.

Using Power Editor, you can create ad creative specifically designed for Facebook’s mobile apps. This means text and images can be customised for mobile, rather than using the same images for both desktop and mobile.

With an increasing number of people using Facebook on their mobile phone, it’s mad not to create variations of all your ads which are designed solely for mobile.

4. More control over bidding

The Self Serve bidding system is like a black box — it’s impossibly to really know what’s going on, especially if your choose the “your bid will be optimised to get more likes”.

Power Editor gives you much more finely tuned control over your bids.

Why is this important?

Because your budget is likely limited, you should be interested in getting the maximum conversion for your union’s money.

Experimenting with various bidding options, whether it’s Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Mille (CPM or Cost per 1000 impressions), will mean as you grow more familiar with the tool you should lower your costs.

5. Bulk ad creation

Self Serve lets you boost one ad at a time, or create one promoted post or ad. This can be good for a once-off, but if you’re managing an ongoing campaign with multiple themes or targets, it can a nightmare to use Self Serve.

Power Editor lets you create scores of ads. You can duplicate ads and use saved audiences, which allows you to tweak ads, images or audiences without going through the entire ad creation process. Think of all that saved time not having to re-select the same countries, languages, ages, interests and so on.

Are you using Power Editor already?

Most unions that I’m aware of use the Self Serve tool — and why not? It’s the default option. But I’d be very interested to know if there’s unions out there already using the Power Editor. How are you finding it, and what kind of results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments.

“If a tweet worked once, send it again” — and other social media lessons from The New York Times

by

Michael Roston at Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent and interesting article about the New York Times’ social media desk.

With over 5 million followers on Twitter, The New York Times has some very pertinent advice and hard lessons, many of which are relevant to unions and other progressive organisations.

The reason I encourage you to read the entire article is that increasingly, union campaigns are “content creators” — that is, an (often unspoken) objective of the campaign is to create “shareable” content (blogs, memes, images, graphics, videos, etc) that summarise the campaign’s issues or spur people to take action.

Additionally, some unions, especially peak bodies like the Australian Council of Trade Unions, are getting into the content game wholesale, through the launch of the news and opinion site Working Life. Many unions have blogs or Tumblrs, either for the unions as a whole or for a specific campaign.

I summarise the main points from the article below.

Understand why people follow you (or fan you) and give them what they want.

Readers come to @nytimes for many reasons. But in major breaking news situations, it becomes abundantly clear that large numbers of readers are glued to our Twitter feed and waiting for the next update. And while Twitter’s misuse in breaking news situations was well lamented in 2013, it is what readers are coming to us for more than anything else.

I’ve said before that unions should know their audience — especially if that audience is their membership and potential membership & supporter base) better than anyone else. Understand who is currently following you or likely to follow you, and make sure you deliver.

Empower your officials, organisers and front-line union staff.

The Times is fortunate to have skilled, deeply sourced reporters all over the world, covering major news as it develops. When they are early to a story and share the news via Twitter, retweets from @nytimes are responded to heavily by our readers.

Letting our trusted reporters deliver some news first helps them connect directly with an interested audience, and delivers news in a timely manner without sacrificing our commitment to accuracy.

Your elected officials, organisers and other staff, and especially your delegates should be powerful advocates for your union and its campaigns. Don’t think that the institutional union social media account should automatically be the only channel to get your message out. Most people build rapport on Twitter with other individuals, so be prepared to retweet them instead of giving all the good tweets to the union’s official account. Instead, empower the individuals in your union and use the union’s institutional account to amplify what they say.

Use your institutional account to amplify discussions.

Beyond clicks and retweets, our institutional Twitter accounts, of which we have several beyond @nytimes, were effective tools to advance storytelling by the Times’s journalists. Some methods, like sending callouts for sources on major stories used a variety of methods, including social media. Others relied solely on Twitter.

One effective method was organizing highly structured Twitter Q&A sessions with reporters using institutional accounts as a moderator. At times when there was a heightened reader interest in a complex, developing news story, New York Times Twitter accounts curated discussions with Times reporters.

Social media is about discussion and dialogue. The example given by the NYT — the curated Q&A session — is a good one for unions to consider experimenting with. The recent ACTU Organising Conference 2014 for example had a specific “official” Twitter account for the conference that retweeted conference attendees questions during certain sessions. Think about how your union’s institutional account could be used to engage in creative dialogue, or to highlight existing discussions, rather than just broadcast.

Have someone actively in charge of your accounts (but it’s OK to have an autopilot too).

On a Twitter account that was automated at the time, the error snowballed around social media and the web for hours. When our hands are minding the feed, errors like that either don’t happen or have less of an impact.

In other cases, a small amount of editorial effort was the difference between one of the best tweets of the year and a headline from print that was less effective in the context of social media.

The NYT auto-tweets it’s articles when there’s not someone “on the desk”, but when someone is actively thinking about what to tweet, the results are better. For a union, this means that setting up an auto-broadcast system for your union’s web updates or campaign news is “OK” (according to the NYT), but you’ll get more engagement and better results if you have someone curate them.

Clarity is better than click-bait.

Ultimately, we don’t always need to try so hard to write an unforgettable tweet, or one that tempts the reader too much. Clarity and straightforwardness around interesting subject matter are ultimately rewarded by substantial reader interest.

By “click-bait”, I mean those viral-sounding “Upworthy-style” headlines which are cryptic or ambiguous, and seem designed to get you to click on them. While you may get some clicks through this style of manipulation, the view of the NYT is that by being clearer and straightforward about what the article is about, you will get greater engagement.

Repetition and evergreen are key.

Many New York Times articles, videos, slideshows, graphics, and blog posts don’t need to be read only at the very moment they were published. There is an enduring interest in coming back to them at moments that are more convenient for the reader. That’s why we see some articles floating on The Times’s Most E-Mailed list for a week or more. The same is true of Twitter.

During 2013, we began consistently scheduling multiple runs of tweets highlighting some of our best enterprise material, especially during weekend hours and overnight, when @nytimes is mostly automated. It goes without saying that if you tweet more, you’ll get more traffic overall. But what we found when we scheduled tweets on Saturday and Sunday was that the average click per tweet grew substantially. What that meant to us was that a story that was of great interest to readers on a Tuesday afternoon is likely to be of interest to readers grazing Twitter on a Saturday night who didn’t see it the first time around. It also encouraged us to think about how our Twitter accounts can better serve The Times’s global audience.

I have certainly found with this blog that some content from several years ago continues to rank highly in traffic and referrals; for unions this means that some content on your website may be “evergreen” — for example articles about rights at work.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the way that Facebook and Twitter work is that if you send an update once, only a proportion of your fans and followers will actually see it. By sending it again (in a slightly different way) you can ensure that people who are logged into Facebook or Twitter at a different time also have a chance of seeing your content. For national unions in countries crossing time-zones, this can be especially important.

Success is difficult to predict.

We tweeted some stories without any expectation that they would be popular on social media. But suddenly a story buried deep in the paper, targeted toward a niche audience, was widely and heavily shared across social media. We couldn’t always pinpoint the origin of the great interest in an article, but we liked finding the nowhere from out of which a wave of social media attention came.

The example given by the NYT is of a celebrity tweeting a link to their fans. While not everyone has celebrities on call to share updates or retweets, the elements of “viral” are increasingly understood.

Facebook for Unions – My new book is coming soon

by

Soon I will be launching a new book for unions, called Unionify: Social Campaigning for Unions.

Before I publish the entire book, I am releasing a short excerpt: the chapter on Facebook.

Facebook for Unions - covers

There are more than 1.15 billion people with a Facebook account in 2013, and over 618 million people use it daily. This platform offers more than just a way to stay connected to friends and family; it is an essential tool in the campaigning and communications toolbox.

Facebook allows your union to be available to people on a trusted, popular platform, where members and supporters can see “real” people (their friends, family and coworkers) interacting with your union.

This chapter, Facebook for Unions, is a preview for you to see the kind of material that will be in Unionify.

Inside look at Facebook for Unions

Facebook is not the only social network I cover in Unionify. I also look at Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and Tumblr, photosharing sites like Instagram and Flickr, and how to develop your social media campaign strategies and plans.

I will be releasing a few more excerpts from the book over the next few weeks, and if you subscribe to updates from my blog you will receive an email in the next week or so with download details for Facebook for Unions.

Update

Facebook for Unions is now available as an e-book from this website or from Amazon Kindle. A hard-copy will also be available soon.

[button link=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I40IRYY/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00I40IRYY&linkCode=as2&tag=alewhi-20″]Get the Kindle version[/button] [button link=”http://alexwhite.org/shop/facebook-for-unions/”]Buy the Ebook[/button]

 

Day -14: Can social media really change votes?

by

Tonight I was honoured to give a guest lecturer at the Labor Guild School of Management in Boston, Massachusetts about the role of social media for unions.

I’ve written a fair few blog posts (and an e-book) about how unions, political parties and causes can use social media for identifying, activating and motivating activists, delegates and volunteers. I’ve argued that social media — such as Facebook or Twitter — uses the power of weak ties and the psychology of small asks to “nudge” people towards greater identification and support for a cause. The underlying message of these posts has been that social media must be tied to a real world action to have value.

With the national polls in the US election currently tied between Obama and Romney, the question of whether 2012 is a “social media election” remains open. Obama holds a massive lead over Romney when it comes to Facebook fans (or “likes”), Twitter followers and on every other social network.

Research into the role of social media in influencing or even predicting the outcomes of elections is not good. For example, research into whether Twitter could predict the outcome of elections (pdf link) based on “sentiment analysis”, tweets, follows and retweets found that it was “no better than chance” in its predictive power.

In my view, even having hundreds or thousands of likes or retweets, or hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube does not necessarily equate to any concrete outcomes for a campaign.

Another thing to consider is that around 90 percent of the electorate has already made up their mind weeks or even months out from Election Day — which means that all the advertising and social media shares in the world will not change their views. The nature of social media advertising is also largely counter-productive to the personal, in depth, human nature of conversations required to influence someone’s voting behaviour. Research shows that personal, face-to-face conversations are most likely to influence someone’s vote and actually get them to vote. A postage-stamp sized ad on Facebook, or a story on a newsfeed almost diminishes the message.

The 2008 election was largely described as the digital election, due to Obama’s massive online fundraising success. However, in the weeks leading up to November 6, the real strength of his campaign was the field operation — the enormous Get Out The Vote machine — that substantially increased the number of people registered to vote and who actually ended up voting.

Social media’s utility really is identifying activists and potential supporters — who then must be contacted in traditional ways.

In my experience in union organising (and social organising) is that the drop-off rate (or “flake rate”) for events is around 50%. This means that when you confirm 10 people on the phone to attend a union meeting, you’ll probably expect to get five of them to actually attend. On social media, this is even higher. This is due to the move from a “frictionless” online environment (Facebook) to the real world.

Digital is much more effective for fundraising because the fiction is largely reduced or removed. For activities or action in the real world, the fiction of moving from online to the flesh is substantial.

Can social media actually change how someone votes?

Probably not. Changing someone’s attitude is very difficult. Even multi-million dollar mass advertising campaigns is mostly unable to change someone’s view once they’ve formed it. Twitter — which is mostly an echo-chamber when it comes to politics — is probably even less useful than Facebook for its ability to change someone’s views.

What can change views — and votes — is personal contact. Real people doing real things in the real world. The most effective way to change attitudes is to change behaviour.

Social media can help in targeting, in identifying, the people who need to be contacted.

This is where I believe the Obama campaign has really excelled. They’ve linked their digital and social media operation — their massive email and donor database, interactions on the BarackObama.com website, and engagement on social networks — with their field operations. People who sign up online are contacted by volunteers and encouraged to take real world actions in support Obama’s re-election.

But social media changing votes alone? I’m not convinced.