Five tips for starting a social movement

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ifrahim ashaq
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Five tips for starting a social movement
Five tips for starting a social movement

Five tips for starting a social movement

At the World Bank Group, we want to help create a social movement to end poverty and increase shared prosperity. But how is this achieved? In broader terms, how does any social movement start? It’s not easy. The world is full of failed attempts. The obstacles are many and include skeptics who create doubts by saying that the task is impossible and that others have tried and failed. Why waste time on a futile effort? Although Albert Camus thought that Sisyphus was happy, he never managed to push the boulder to the top of the mountain. However, in nearly three decades of fighting poverty, I have come to the conclusion that optimism in the face of seemingly intractable problems is a choice. If the cause is just and you are working in an institution with the means to make a real difference in the lives of the poor, an optimistic spirit is a moral responsibility.

Here are five quick ideas on how to help jumpstart a social movement:

  1. Find a cause that connects to people’s deepest passions about right and wrong, that makes them think about what really matters, creating a better world for their children.
  2. Determine what concrete actions will move the movement forward.
  3. Set specific goals and a deadline to carry out the actions.
  4. Enlist the support of associates who share the passion and ensure the movement is not about one individual or organization. The cause must be so important that individual and group identities can be temporarily set aside in pursuit of the goal.
  5. Evaluate progress towards the goal and be consistent in using data to drive movement.
The largest social movements have taught us that with enough determination and commitment, extraordinary things can happen. We all share the responsibility to act against inequality, poverty, and injustice. If we don’t, nothing changes, injustice persists, and poverty becomes more and more entrenched. I know we can create a movement to end poverty and increase shared prosperity that will change the world, even in these difficult times. We can make this happen. Join us by submitting your ideas via Twitter using the hashtag #what would you do, or by leaving a comment here. How To Be More Social

5 tips on how to manage social media time efficiently

We all know that social media and digital marketing is a great opportunities but rarely time efficient. You can get increased traffic to the website, greater visibility, and reach a significantly larger target group, etc., etc. But how time-efficient is social media really? No matter how well social media is, we often run into a challenge and that is time. It takes time to manage social media and nothing that can be managed “with one hand”. It is especially time-consuming when you do the company’s presence in the right way. By the right way, I mean creating engagement with your followers with the right type of posts and not just sharing links or pictures of the office dog. A study by Social Media Examiner found that 90% of marketers say that social media is important to their business and that 63% spend more than 6 hours a week on social media marketing activities. Being active in several channels takes time, you must make the right type of post at the best time and day and follow up on statistics. Here are 5 tips on how you can work more time efficiently with social media.

#1 Limit yourself

Many companies I come across have started their presence on multiple platforms – because others are there. Just because others are there doesn’t mean you have to be there. No one has time to engage in all the platforms they “should” be on. The biggest (only?) reason to be on social media is that your audience is there and you think you can engage with them.
The first step is to think about where your target group is and what you want to achieve. It takes a bit of detective work to understand the difference between the platforms and to set clear goals, but it will save you time by focusing on the right network.
Start by building a presence in the network where your target group is located. Once you’ve established your presence, you can move on to the next platform.
Think about it this way, if your target audience isn’t there, don’t waste resources on that platform – no matter how many people use it or how popular it is.

#2 Automated

If you don’t only work with social media, you need to automate as much as you can. But you shouldn’t do too much, you want to see that there is a person behind it. For example, you should not automate responses. It doesn’t look good if all of your followers who retweet your tweets get the exact same response – “thanks for sharing, feel free to follow me”. Maybe that person is already following you? Make the answers a little more personal. You should engage manually to create engagement and credibility. This means that it takes a little more time, but commitment is important today. This is also one of the reasons to start with a few social media so you can easily manage and respond within a reasonable time. Usually, there are three tools you need to become more efficient.
  1. Scheduler Planning and scheduling posts in advance will save you a lot of time. You don’t have to manually make the posts and can also get the posts out at the best time and day. Personally, I use Buffer to schedule all my posts and to also capture and fill up other people’s posts and articles. HootSuite is also a good alternative If you have good articles of your own that are still current and get visitors, so-called ” evergreen posts”, Social Jukebox, or Meet Edgar may be worth looking at. Those tools automatically republish your posts.
  2. Curation You need to find valuable content from other experts that you can share. Here there are several tools to use. I myself have an RSS feed in my version of Buffer, which means that I receive suggestions for articles from selected companies directly in Buffer (premium version). It saves my time because with one click I can share relevant articles with my followers. Feedly is also an RSS reader where you can keep up to date with the best bloggers and experts in your niche. Another option is to subscribe to newsletters that often contain great articles that you can share.
  3. Monitoring You also need to know when someone mentions your company in social media. When you monitor specific words, you can capture mentions and quickly engage in those conversations. Mention or SEMRush are two good tools that help you catch when you are mentioned on social media.

#3 Create and design images & video

Creating and designing nice images and short videos is a must today. Often there is not enough good material from your own everyday life and then you need to get hold of images in a simple way. And not just images, but you also need to design these. Here Canva is my lifesaver, never before have I been able to create images for social media so quickly. There are loads of ready-made templates for most platforms. So you can make nice pictures in the right size and with a message in the picture if you want. Everything from Facebook to blog posts, LinkedIn, and actually even use your own measurements. In addition to having ready-made templates, you can create your own images from scratch and they also have a large number of images that are free. As an alternative to Canva, there is Stencil, which has both a free and a paid version. PicMonkey is also worth a look. Here you have even more functions such as retouching, editing, designing, and creating collages. PicMonkey costs $5.99/month. Once you have designed your image, you simply download it to your computer, phone or directly to social media (depending on the version & program) and can use the image wherever and however you want.

#4 Analyze

You’re hopefully not posting on social media just for the sake of it – you’re doing it to achieve a specific goal for your business. You need to set clear measurable goals with your presence. What do you want to achieve with the presence?
  • increased brand awareness
  • increased traffic to the website
  • get more leads
That’s what you should measure. Only then will you know if your efforts produce a result and are in line with the goals you have set? The first place to start is Google Analytics. Traffic is not the only thing you should measure, but you need to be sure that your efforts in social media generate more traffic and then you need to see which of the platforms gives the best results. If you don’t get a lot of traffic from a platform, you need to think about why you are active there. Or if that particular channel is worth your time. But remember that traffic is only part of the truth. If you see that you are getting engagement such as shares, likes and comments, you are building awareness of your brand and then it may be worth continuing. An alternative is True social metrics to track engagement and see which post performed best. Each social media has its own built-in analysis tool where you get information. As a supplement, I use Buffer. There I see which posts have gone the best and can then schedule these again so that even more people can see the posts. The bottom line is that you want to find out which social media efforts are meeting your goals so you can focus and spend your time on the platforms that provide the best ROI.

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