Social Enterprise Series: Social Media

Does your business have a coherent social media strategy, or are you throwing random updates to the wind when you can? In our digital age, social media is crucial for your business. It is a platform for: creating your brand/identity, setting yourself as an industry expert, sharing your impact, building partnerships, engaging with your audience/customers and driving sales.   In our Social Enterprise Incubator Series, we follow 15 incredible social entrepreneurs who are leading the road to change with our Incubator Programme. Get a glimpse into their challenges, developments and lightbulb moments as the cohort shares their experience over the 6 month programme! In this post we learn about the struggles Joe encountered with social media and the tips he learned to build a proper strategy.     Brake the Cycle is a social enterprise that organises cycle trips around the UK and mainland Europe, staying at organic farms, sustainability centres and ecological initiatives. For us, social media is one of our main tools for interacting with, and marketing to, our potential customers, keeping our extended network up to date and building lasting relationships with those who have been on our tours already. Finding the right tone, knowing the right amount of content to generate to make sure we keep in people’s minds but don’t become spammy, and knowing which of the many social platforms to use, are just a few of the issues we’ve faced. So having a session on it with Hatch was well anticipated and proved incredibly valuable. In the workshop, Neila took us through the whole process, showing how to build and develop a strategy, which is what had been missing somewhat for us. We’d been like magpies attracted to different tools and tactics we’d read about on blogs rather than developing a coherent strategy and plugging the tools into that. One thing that really resonated with us was her empathise on it being ‘social’ media rather than thinking of it as sales and marketing per se. So keeping the tone affable and really speaking directly to your ideal customer, tailoring the tone to fit them. Her rule was a 70/20/10 split, 70% being high value interesting content for your customers, 20% sharing other pages posts that are relevant to yours and only a small 10% being on marketing your products through CTA (call to action). Of that 70%, she also stressed the importance of sharing your social enterprise’s impact, a key factor that will draw customers to your business. Something else that really resonated with us was finding more UGT (user generated content), so on our most recent tour we encouraged participants to @ us or use a specific #hashtag when sharing their pictures on Instagram which has resulted in lots of quality photos, capturing a variety of stories and aspects of our tours. In future we’ll be looking at ways to incentivise our participants to engage with this more whilst on tour as part of a larger, well defined social media strategy.   Watch this space as we share more posts by the incredible changemakers on our Incubator programme!  Interested in joining one of Brake the Cycle’s sustainable cycle trips? Check out their next Coast to Coast trip: an Immersive, Sustainable Cycle Journey from England’s Northwest to Northeast Coast.