It’s been a bit of a quiet week this week (perhaps no surprise with the bank holiday), so along with the usual news I’ve included some tools that may help with your social media efforts – the marketing ones a few weeks ago were well received so hopefully these will be too!
This week’s news
- We’ve opened recruitment for our Fellowship course in London, a cracking 9 month course for those of you setting up an organisation.
- Feeling lucky? Then why not enter SEUK’s competition to win some social enterprise goodies. It’s all part of the build up to Social Saturday, taking place on September 13th.
- The RBS SE100 awards have two new categories this year: the storyteller award, designed to encourage social enterprises to share their tales of social transformation, as well as the Resilience award, for organisations that have consistently worked for social change over a number of years. You can enter here.
- If your organisation could benefit from a fully-funded extra member of staff, The University of Birmingham would like to hear from you.
- SSE East student Chris Lee has collected a series of inspirational case studies from social entrepreneurs, ‘Experts in Experience‘ – several of the stories are from fellow SSE’ers. (Chris’ whole blog is well worth looking through, it is a treasure trove of good information).
- Abracadabra! Top magician Dynamo visited the Breathe Magic Camp, which was featured on Newsround. The camp was founded by SSE Fellow Yvonne Farquharson, and they also got a fab write up in the Guardian.
- Trading for Sustainability starts in less than two weeks.
- Have I Got Social Enterprise News For You cropped up in this blog by Just Giving’s Kirsty Marrins: How LinkedIn could become every charity’s secret weapon
Social Media Tools
Right, here we go. Apropos of nothing, here’s 5 of my favourite social media tools:
1. Tweetdeck https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
If you want to use Twitter seriously, you’ll quickly find that the main site has some limitations. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are two of the most popular platforms to manage your Twitter feed more effectively and each has its own loyal supporters. Why would you want to use either? I’ll use my Tweetdeck as an example:
I follow about 900 people on Twitter, which can sometimes be overwhelming. Tweetdeck allows me to organise Twitter into columns, and to make more sense of what is going on.
In the example above, Column 1 is my main feed- everyone I follow on Twitter goes through here. Column 2 is every time someone mentions me or the SSE, so that I can reply quickly. Column 3 is a search for any time someone types ‘start a social enterprise’ so I can send them a link to the school. Column 4 is a feed of journalists who write about social enterprise, and Column 5 is everything that our SSE schools are tweeting.
Easy!
(Note – the discussion of the England football squad in the second column is definitely work related, it was part of a wider conversation. Maybe).
2. Buffer https://bufferapp.com/
Buffer allows you to schedule your tweets in advance, which is a fantastic time saver. If you combine it with Tweroid, you can set up your tweets to go out at the time that the highest numbers of your followers are online, making sure that the maximum number of people see your posts.
(If you want to know how many people are seeing your tweets, Twitter opened up their analytics platform to anyone and everyone this week. What does this mean? This handy post from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations explains all.)
3. Canva https://www.canva.com/
I hate designing things and have the artistic ability of a snail. Canva makes it really easy to come up with graphic designs for blog posts, facebook profiles and more – I made the Have I Got Social Enterprise News For You image at the top of the page in about three minutes (pipe down all of you thinking ‘looks like it’.
4. Quora http://www.quora.com/
Quora is a simple premise – people ask questions on the site, and then the site’s users answer them. What makes it slightly different is who those users are – questions have been answered by Stephen Fry, Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Buble, for example.
How can you use it? It’s useful as somewhere to establish credibility and build your profile within your field – be warned though, it can suck you in for hours.
5. Slideshare https://www.slideshare.net/
Slideshare is a tool that I’ve only recently begun to use. It’s a platform which allows you to post presentations in the public domain, for anyone to see. It’s a really good way for you to promote content that you have created for other uses anyway.
It doesn’t take long to post each presentation and the results are pretty dramatic – this What is Social Enterprise presentation that I posted in June has now been viewed by over 3000 people. That’s 3000 people who may never have heard of SSE who now have done!
Have a good week
