Show Notes

Navigating Social Media for Non-Profit Success: Insights from Ineke Clark from Ambition Social.

 

In this episode of The Service Game Podcast, we explore the remarkable achievements of Ineke during her tenure as CEO of MLSA from 2016 to 2019, where she increased membership by 200 percent and sponsorship by 400 percent through the use of social media. Ineke's success story continues with the launch of her business, Ambition, aimed at helping business owners leverage social media and digital marketing to grow their brands. Tune in to learn valuable strategies for social media marketing, particularly for non-profit associations.

 

00:00 Introduction to Ineke's Achievements

01:05 Transforming MLSA: A Case Study

01:28 The Power of Social Media in Business Growth

01:42 Launching Ambition: A New Venture

01:58 Hands-On Branding and Marketing

02:08 Where to Find Ineke Online

02:16 Today's Episode: Social Media for Non-Profits

 

Links:

www.onsomble.com.au

https://www.instagram.com/ambitionsocial/

 

Show transcript

 

Today's episode of the Service Game Podcast is a very special one for me, because today we have our very first podcast guest.  Let me tell you a little bit about Ineke Clark, who you are about to hear from talking about social media for not for profit associations.  Ineke is a marketing mentor and she's passionate about working one on one with business owners.

 

To help them define their goals, overcome roadblocks and pave out a clear path to success.  I first met Ineke many years ago when I was working as the CEO for the Landscape Association in New South Wales and the ACT, and Ineke was in the same role for the Master Landscapers of South Australia, and we worked quite closely together, and I cannot tell you how clever a person Ineke is.

 

And how well respected she is not only in the landscaping space, but more particularly in this marketing space.  So she's well known for her tenure as CEO of MLSA  and in her time there from 2016 to 2019, she transformed that organisation into a thriving and powerful industry association, achieving a 200  percent increase in membership.

 

and a 400 percent increase in sponsorship under her direction. Large portion of that success during Ineke's tenure there can be attributed to the way she utilised social media to activate and nurture a community of members and sponsors for the association.  In 2019 Ineke launched her own business, Ambition.

 

With the goal of helping   more business owners to achieve their ambitions by harnessing the power of social media and digital marketing to reach their target market and grow their brand.  Ineke loves to get her hands on brands and overhaul them in every aspect of branding and marketing to help them reach and even exceed their potential.

 

You'll find Ineke on social media by searching for at Ambition Social on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. But for now, let's have a listen in to today's episode on social media for not for profit associations.

 

  Welcome to the Service Game Podcast brought to you by onsomble. I'm your host, Julie Krieger. For the past 14 years, I've been helping associations to grow and thrive, establishing systems, writing policies and procedures, implementing membership and sponsorship strategies, Setting up operations, undertaking complete governance restructures, developing strategies, and advising CEOs, presidents, and boards.

 

I am driven to support the hardworking people who give their time, heart, and soul in the service of their members and in the pursuit of the greater good.  Join me as we delve deep into this innovative, creative, values based and mission driven thing. I call the service game.  Let's get going with today's episode.

 

 Ineke Clark from Ambition. Thank you so much for joining me today.It's exciting to have you here as my very first guest on the podcast. 

 

It's an absolute pleasure to be here, Julie. I always love talking to you and I think your voice is made for podcasting.

 

Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. We can come back to that if we have time at the end. No, I'm kidding. All right. So let's kick off.

 

We're talking today about social media for not for profit associations. You've obviously got background in that area yourself, as well as successfully running your business. Looking at social media for small business and associations over the last, what's it been, eight years, something in that order?

 

Yeah, I've been a consultant for eight years now. Yeah. Yeah.

 

So how important is social media for not for profit associations?  why should they have a social media presence? And should they have a social media presence? 

 

So the first answer is yes, every not for profit association or any industry association or club.

should have a social media presence. It's a no brainer, really. You're not going to reach all of your members or all of your sponsors via social media, but because such a large portion of the population, I think they estimate that more than 80 percent of the Australian population spends time on social media on a regular basis or are active social media users.So why wouldn't you? Why would you limit yourself by not having a social media presence? You may not have time to be really active on social media, but you'd be silly not to at least have a presence.

 

Yeah. Okay. So, so they should all be doing it. Does that include in circumstances where, for example, an association is made up of lawyers or doctors or people who are by nature risk averse and the things that they might be talking about as an association might come with?

You know, inherent risk.

 

Absolutely. Yeah. And in that case, it may not be that they speak about anything specific on social media. It's more just about brand awareness. So having a platform, having a presence on there, having the membership details so that other potential members or sponsors can actually find information about that association. So yes, some, some industries or some professionals may need to be really careful about what they share online.  I think you can do so. Even, even for example, the landscaping associations that we were involved in had to be careful about what they shared online to a degree to avoid upsetting certain sponsors or members or  government bodies, for example. So I think there's always inherent risk, but the good thing with the lawyers is they'd be able to give themselves their own legal advice.

 

Such a good point.  Exactly. And is there ever an argument just as an aside to that? I'm working with an with a society at the moment made up of doctors and they're just in the process of setting up their own podcast, which obviously is different from social media, but it will obviously come with social media activity.And they're taking a cautious approach, which I fully respect and understand  by loading that initially onto the member backend of the website. So it's member only access because of the potential for. social media to go rogue on them, I guess. You know, if they're talking about contentious medical issues, for example, or they certainly wouldn't be giving advice, but yeah, they're just being pretty cautious about what they want the general public to see. But there is a divide within that society a division of opinion. about whether that's the right approach, the wrong approach. So look, they've sensibly decided, I think, to go cautiously in the first place and then see how it evolves. But have you had experience with that sort of situation and what options are available to organisations like that, where they are sensitive.

 

I think again, it's like the last point. If you're really nervous about sharing or speaking about a specific topic on social media, there's no reason why you couldn't just say, new podcast episode launched and actually not mention the topic.  I think it's a really tricky space these days because, you know, so much of social media is about controversial topics, like we've just had the US. election and, you know, all of all of the subjects around that are extremely controversial and potentially triggering to lots of different types of people. And thankfully, me personally, I've I haven't had too many concerns. It's more been about politics of, because a lot of my clients are within the construction industry space. Politics around who's tagging who and who doesn't want to be, who doesn't want someone else to be tagged or using their photo or things like that. So there's always politics on social media. And yes, it sounds like this association that you're talking about their right to be cautious because they don't want to fuel online controversy or attract unwanted attention. But I still don't think that's an argument for not utilizing social media at all, because if they really do, I'm guessing that the end goal is to grow their membership base. And  If all the podcasts are loaded into  locked  membership area in the website, then how do they broadcast the great work that they're doing other than through  a channel like social media?

 

Okay. So within a not for profit association, I can hear people listening to this saying, we just don't have time and we don't have the resource capacity to embark on social media. And if we can't embark on it and keep it up, we're just not going to do it. So who should  be responsible for managing the social media in a not for profit setting? And how can they manage it in a really effective way so that it doesn't become , the bulk of one person's working week, for example.

 

Absolutely. And that's such an important question because I think there's a lot of businesses.

I certainly work with many business owners who've run a successful business for many years, and they've never had to factor in the time or the costs involved in running social media accounts.  That's becoming even more complicated now because soon it will be the case that you'll have to pay for advertising on social media on top of just running a social media account.

 

But sorry, we'll just stop you there. Do you mean that just running an account will start to cost as well as the ads?

 

Potentially, but  I'm more referring to the fact that the organic reach is diminishing by the week. 

So on Facebook, we used to be able to share a post and anyone who was online at that time and following your page would see that post.

 

Now that post is so it will become buried in the depths of the Facebook algorithm and the way to get it up the top and back in front of people is by paying for a sponsored post.  That's what I'm referring to is that  initially businesses didn't even have to be on social media at all. You could run a successful business or an association and you did not have to have a social media presence. You could do other forms of advertising and you could do really quite well from that. Fast forward to most likely, I think the pandemic was the major turning point for all businesses and organisations. And that was everyone suddenly realized, oh my gosh, when we're all isolated at home, which we are increasingly becoming more so in this day and age, How do I reach people? How do I reach my audience? And everyone's turning more inwards on their devices. How do I actually reach new people if they're not actively listening to the radio, watching TV, reading newspapers, reading magazines.   So if you're running an association and you're thinking, Oh my gosh, I'm already so busy. How on earth do I find the time and the headspace to also post to social media?  I've got a few time saving tips for you.  One would be to  research and implement some form of social media scheduling software.  Because for example, if your association has the goal of sharing one social media post per week,  rather than setting aside time every week to create and share one post, it is a lot more efficient to actually sit down and spend a few hours creating four posts. So you've got one post ready to go for every week and pre load it into some social media scheduling software.  That means that no matter what comes up on your other days or your other weeks, you're not going to be interrupted and you're not going to potentially be Distracted from creating that post is much harder to block out time, get into the head space and individually create posts each week than it is to bulk create in advance.

 

Yep. Let alone every day, if that's your goal or every second day.

 

Exactly. Another tip would be to actually partner with a content creator.  So if you're an association, that's got the resources for it. By content creator, I'm talking about, say, a videographer or a social media agency. So that is someone that you can give a wish list of content and they will produce it for you,  and then you can post that pre produced content.

 You may not have the time or the skills, instead of having to sit down and actually create that content for you, you can use the resources that your association has to get a professional to actually produce Videos or photos or graphics that you can then post to your social media.

 

Yeah. And again, I can hear people saying now, yeah, but how do you control a message if you're  outsourcing that? How did they get the tone of voice right?  What's the answer to that?

 

The answer to that is a partnering with the right person. So doing your research and partnering with the right person, cause you're absolutely right. If you partner with the wrong person, then it's not going to work,  but be doing a strategy first. So, and that may mean working with a marketer, a digital marketer who can actually develop a strategy to make sure the messaging is correct. Or it could also be having a post approval system. For example, so if the content creator produces a post that you get to actually approve it before it goes live. But what I was talking about when I initially brought that up was more of the case of a content created, creating a promotional video, for example, for your association that you can then share and you control the messaging that comes with

 

 Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yep. And you can repurpose that, I guess, in a multitude of ways for newsletter content as well.

 

 

 

Yeah, that's right.  So there's quite a few layers to this. It's not simple. And I think that that's why a lot of people get quite scared and confused about social media. Which is very fair and, there's lots of different tools that you can use to save time and it's also, I guess, identifying the right person within the association to actually be looking after that job and it could be someone internal or it could be someone internal actually coordinating someone external who's got the time and the skills to do it for you.

 

Yeah. And I feel like there's actually a bit of fear around how professional. The presentation of what's posted is,  is it necessary that it's schmick and it's produced? And it's, you know, I say professional in that sense. I, I obviously assume that most associations are going to want some level of professionalism in their messaging and in the way they present, but what about the production value.

 

Absolutely. Well, the funny thing about social media is that it's not always the most polished video that performs the best on social media. And you don't necessarily need to produce this beautiful polished production in order to connect with your members.  For example, once again, if your members are landscapers, they may prefer just some smartphone footage or something a little bit less polished.

 

I guess it's about understanding who your audience is.

 

 Communication is better in whatever form than not doing it at all.

 

Absolutely. Yeah. And that, that's the message that I really want to send to everyone who's listening today is that there is a million barriers to posting to social media. But the goal is it's better to actually be posting and have a presence and be communicating with your members than not posting at all. And it's probably a case of just working out what your roadblocks are or what your fears are. And working out how to overcome them in a way that you feel comfortable, but also you can afford.

 

Yeah. So some questions then around  minimum viable product, if you like,  if I'm an association and I'm not yet engaged in social media  for the business,  what's the minimum amount of time requirement I can commit? And if I were to look to outsource for some support, what's the kind of minimum amount  that I might need to commit financially in order to meet that? See some kind of impact.

 

Absolutely. So if you're managing it yourself, then it is going to, it is going to consume several hours per week.  It's hard to accurately gauge exactly how many hours because it really depends on what platforms you need to be active on. And that very much depends on what industry you're in.

 

Yep.

 

Because there's, you know, the common social media platforms that might be useful for an association would be Facebook, which is the biggest social media platform in the world. Instagram,  LinkedIn for more sort of corporate professional style industry. So like the doctors, for example, I can imagine them having success on LinkedIn And TikTok and TikTok might be for a sporting club, for example, with young members, right? Might not be able to reach your members on the other platforms, but you will reach them on TikTok.  And each of those platforms would have a different time requirement for how long it takes to manage. So there's no simple answer to that question, unfortunately. Obviously it's going to be less time if you outsource it, because then you're just potentially approving or coordinating the posts with the professional who's creating them for you.  But there is still some time requirement. It's not completely hands off because you still need to have an awareness of what they're posting.

 

Yep.

 

And what about YouTube? I'm hearing more and more that that's an important place to be and to be seen. 

 

Yeah. YouTube's an interesting one. So YouTube shorts is a big one. YouTube shorts is like the YouTube equivalent of say TikTok or Instagram reels. Right.  What I would suggest if someone's looking to get into YouTube, I can't imagine it being a good lead generation tool for associations. And by lead generation, I mean, membership attracting or sponsorship attracting.  It could certainly help with SEO. So if you were creating videos that Are on subjects that your members are really interested in, then it would be a great way of actually getting a bit of brand awareness potentially, but that would rely on your audience actually searching for those particular subjects online. You're creating content for YouTube, then you can repurpose that content across other social media platforms. So  it's probably a case of, if you've got the time and you're creating reels for Instagram, and you've also got the time to upload them to YouTube, then Go for it, but it's a big time commitment.

 

Right,  and not necessarily priority number one.

 

No. Correct. Yeah.      

 

Are there golden rules for the use of social media in this not-for-profit association context?

 

There certainly is, and I think number one golden rule for social media when it comes to forming an online community would be community management.  And by community management, I mean, actually. Nurturing, engaging with your audience on social media, so your audience might be made up primarily of members and sponsors and board members in the executive team. So actually being active on social media, and this is where, it is tricky, there is a time commitment, and that's potentially a daily time commitment or every working day time commitment. And that is, checking in for any messages or comments that you may have received on your social media platforms, commenting on your members posts. So making sure that you're following the members and actually reaching out and engaging with them on social media, reaching out and engaging with your sponsors. That's a big one, obviously supporting your sponsors, being seen to support your sponsors or tagging your sponsors in your posts.  So actually  it's the online equivalent of physical networking. It's as if you're in a room with all your members and sponsors and you're chatting to them. That's what community management is on social media.

 

Right.

 

Yeah. So that's a, that's a golden rule. And I think if you're not. Accustomed to social media. It's easy to just think about the idea. I've done a few posts and I don't need to worry about anything else. But there is the community management element and people might be listening to this going, Oh my gosh, there's so much to it. And there is, but it's an unfortunate reality of the world that we live in these days.

 

Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's a bit like checking your inbox. At the minimum, you're probably doing it in the morning and in the afternoon. And, you know, potentially all the way through the day, which we don't support or promote, but  it needs to become something of that kind where it's top of mind. It's part of what you do as your business as usual kind of process.

 

Exactly. And I could flip that on its head and instead of saying unfortunate, it's actually fortunate because we have a way to actually connect with our members every day.  And that's really unusual.

 

Yeah, absolutely. Assuming your members are following you and engaged, and I guess that's about that outreach and you following them and so on that, that drives that engagement with them in the first place, if you're starting from scratch. Absolutely.

 

Exactly.  You're absolutely spot on Julie. It's not a one way street. So if you're reaching out and engaging with your members, they'll be a lot more likely to reach out and engage with you as well in person and online.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Perfect.   

 

 Latest trends  these things are changing all the time. We're constantly hearing,, it's all about carousels. No, hold on. It's all about reels. It's all about doing funny TikTok dances.  What's hot  and do we need to worry about that? 

 

Yeah, that's such a good question. And it changes weekly, unfortunately.  If you're listening to this right now, at this very point, then Reels and carousel posts are hot on Instagram. That's been the case for quite a while now, so that's  nothing new. But in terms of the potential reach on Instagram in particular as a platform, then reels and carousel posts are the way to achieve that.  Meta advertising, as I spoke about before. So Meta is the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. Meta advertising is, is technically a trend because it's an important way of reaching more people within your niche audience. That's a complicated trend and you may need expert assistance with it. It's not necessarily something that you can just implement yourself,  but it's an important one.  A trend which is easy for any association to achieve is human centric content. So instead of  posting a text tile that has information about your membership, Instead, perhaps actually getting one of your members to speak on camera and explain the membership. So that video of your member speaking on camera is going to be a lot more valuable to your audience than the static textile that actually lists out your member benefits.

 

People like people.

 

Exactly. They do. And that's always been the case, but it's definitely, definitely the case now.

Right. The algorithm now likes people as well. Exactly. Yeah. Because  what drives the algorithm is engagement. So  if your audience is engaging with your post and by engaging, I mean, liking, commenting, sharing, saving your posts, then that content will get pushed out to more people.

 

Yeah. Okay. And engagement is more important than the sheer numbers of, for example, followers. 

 

 Correct. Yeah. So you can have well under a thousand followers and still have a very successful social media presence.  How do you define successful?  Successful is, is it getting results? So is it actually delivering whatever your strategic goals are? So your strategic goals could be attracting new members or new sponsors to your association. Increasing brand awareness for your association and the amazing work that you do. So if it's actually delivering on that, it doesn't matter if you have 300 or 30, 000 followers  and some accounts do end up with a very large number of followers, but they lose their way and they're not necessarily getting that engagement or actually hitting those strategic goals.

 

 Okay. So in terms of communication more broadly, is social media the, the primary way that associations should be communicating with members? Are there other methods that are,  more important, equally important? 

 

It's a fantastic question. And the answer is that social media is important, but it's not the be all and end all. It's one of many tools that we can use to communicate with. Our membership base and our sponsors email marketing would be the next most important one, arguably just as important, if not more so, because  yeah, absolutely. Because again, the aforementioned social media algorithms,  the algorithm being the calculation that controls  how many of your followers see your posts, there is no algorithm on email.So. So every single email that you send, unless there's a heavy spam filter, will get through to its destination.  So email is a lot more targeted way of communicating with your members.

 

Yeah. And is the wisdom still valid that the only audience that you really own is the one that you have on your subscriber database?So your email list, basically.

 

Excellent point. And you're absolutely right. If Meta got shut down tomorrow, so if Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn got shut down tomorrow, we would lose all of that data, all of that platform to which to advertise our association. Yeah. Whereas you can't lose your email database.

 

Yeah, correct. And I've also heard horror stories of companies building up big followings only to have Meta close down their account for some perceived indiscretion of some kind, whether it's real or not. And they've, they've had to start from scratch all over again. Is that still something that happens?

 

It is, and it's something to be very mindful that's a very valuable tip to share with anyone listening to this. If you do set up social media profiles for your association, make sure that you have two factor authentication turned on,  especially if your accounts are being managed by multiple people because there is a high risk that someone's personal Facebook profile, for example, could be hacked and that could be connected to the associations Facebook page, Instagram account, ad account.

 

Yeah. Right. And it does happen.

Unfortunately, it happens more often than what people realize. It's, it's a very difficult process to recover your account once you've been hacked.

 

Yeah.  I've heard that and it just instills fear. 

 

Absolutely. And rightly so.

 

Yeah.

 

 Yeah. Absolutely. Well, given all the time that it takes and potentially the financial investment as well, if you go down that outsourcing path you mentioned earlier about Facebook being the biggest social media platform in the world.  I also hear.  Facebook's for old people and,  it's only people's mums and dads and aunts and uncles that are actually on it.

 

Is that true?  And how are people utilizing it? For example, with online communities, is that still  something that people are doing and should be doing? Continue to do 

 

Facebook is technically for older people. It depends on how you define old people,  but

 

as I get older, the definition gets older as well.

 

Yes, yes, but you're correct. It is the older demographics. It's interesting because  my parents are in their 70s.  And to me, it's very clear from them and their friends that the  60, 70 year olds are all hanging out on Facebook.  And most of them are not on Instagram that I know of. And so  if your demographic is slightly older, then Facebook would be your platform Not, not the likes of Instagram and definitely, definitely not the likes of TikTok. TikTok being a much younger audience of 20s to maybe early 30s.  And Instagram sits in the middle there with thirties and thirties to forties, which is my demographic. And then the next up would be Facebook. So yes, that's absolutely correct.

 

And in terms of online communities, Facebook is perfectly set up for online or Facebook groups.  In fact, they made groups a focus of their strategy many years ago to great success because they knew that If they could get organisations on Facebook using these communities, then they were going to stay on Facebook and not  leave that platform and go off and use another platform.

 

Right. Because it becomes the place they go to talk to their people.

 

Exactly. Yeah. And it's such a powerful thing for an association to be able to set up an online group that is purely for members and within a platform that a lot of those members would be using on a daily basis anyway.

 

Right.  And is that a better place to have community forums and discussions than some of the customized platforms that are out there  have that as their sole purpose, but are, you know, not necessarily a platform that everybody's got loaded onto their phone.

 

Well, my opinion on that is adding another app into the mix of our already very busy days. If people are already accustomed to jumping on Facebook and scrolling through for a few minutes every day, which most of us are, then having that group, that group, that community group. That's really important On a platform that's already being utilised. Well,  you will automatically get more engagement or more participation than you would, if you've got a platform off on another app that they have to actively go to open a separate app to jump on and  engage with everybody else. Download it. Remember the login details, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Yeah. 

 

I have seen groups succeed on other platforms, but it requires a lot of work from the administrators of that group to encourage the members to actually show up on that platform.

 

It's a really good point you raise around moderation and administration of those sorts of groups. How actively involved does the society or association need to be in terms of Tracking the sorts of comments that are being made online  in the group that carries their name. 

 

Absolutely. And fortunately, Facebook has a tool that enables the admins to approve every single post or comment before it goes live. So it's not going to be free for all where you open the doors to members jumping on and complaining about the association or In fighting with other members, for example, you can actually  moderate every single piece of content that is posted in that group. So everyone's probably breathing a sigh of relief at that knowledge. But it is extremely important that the administrators are across what's happening in the group and therefore it does take time again. And I You know, that's a bit of a theme of this chat, but it's true. If you're going to set up a group like that, you can't just set it up and check it once a week. It's a probably having notifications on and checking regularly, or at least checking once a day. 

 

How important is a tool like that, a place for members to connect with other members  in the broad scheme of associations and communications ? Is it a must? 

 

I wouldn't say that it's a must. I would say it would be a very powerful tool for you to utilise as an association, but if you have a reasonable organic social media strategy, and by that I mean you're posting on a regular basis to your social media profiles, and you're emailing your members on a regular basis, Then a Facebook group is wonderful add on to that, but it's not a must.

 

Yeah, that will be a relief to many to hear. 

 

Absolutely.

 

 So if you're an association that's really wanting to nurture and grow your membership base and you've got the time to do so, it is the perfect solution. If you're already a very busy person,  it's probably not a good idea. 

 

Okay. And I'm thinking now about  that comment and A point that we raised a little while ago around not starting something that you can't continue in a,  meaningful way. And everything I hear about social media and many other things is that consistency is key and it's consistency in the long term that actually yields the results. that also makes me think, well, what are the big mistakes that you see? I'm going to guess that starting and stopping is probably one or  not having that commitment to engagement. 

 

Absolutely. Starting and stopping would be one of the biggest mistakes or the most common mistakes I see. Not the biggest mistake, the most common mistake that I see.

 

Okay.

 

And that is businesses getting excited.  Either excited or they've hit a quiet patch and they panic.  For example, if you're finding that your membership numbers are down and you're thinking, Oh my gosh, I want to drum up a bit more interest, you'll go on a posting frenzy and you'll post three times a week for a month. And then suddenly you get some results from that and you stop posting and you don't post for another three months or even another year.  And your social media profiles go completely dormant until you have a quiet spot again. And then you pick up the phone or start mapping out some more social media posts. That's  very inefficient and you're actually missing a huge number of opportunities by taking that approach.  And you'd be better to post less, but post more consistently throughout the year than to go on these posting sprees.  Because it's true what you said, that consistency is what gets results on social media. If people are regularly engaging with your content, they're more likely to see your content. So if you're popping up and posting and then disappearing again for a few months, then you're going to lose that opportunity to reach more people.

 

Yeah. So even posting once a week is worthwhile if you're consistently posting once a week.

 

Absolutely. Yeah. And that, that's very platform dependent as well because a platform like LinkedIn, you could actually get away with posting once a month and you'd be absolutely fine.  Seriously? Absolutely. Yeah. But this is industry dependent I'm talking about.

 

Yeah, sure. So I know that there's some companies that will post three times a week to Instagram, but if that same Business or association posted three times a week to LinkedIn. It would be flooding the feed with too much content, if that makes sense.

 

Right. So what's that key difference? Is that about the frequency with which people on LinkedIn actually check in on LinkedIn?

 

It's quality over quantity would be the right answer to that question.  Instagram is a place where  Quantity is important.  If you're not popping up in someone's feed every few days with posts, then you're just not going to get that visibility. Whereas with LinkedIn, people tend to only log in mostly during work hours. And if you're flooding their feed every day with One, two or three posts, then they're going to get quite bored and just scroll past your content. So LinkedIn is more intentional. And therefore  the quality side is more important. Whereas Instagram, it's more about frequency of exposure.

 

 That's really interesting. I hadn't. Gathered that.    Okay, we've touched a little bit on common mistakes.

 

If I were running a not for profit association and I came to you for advice and I said, Ineke, I need your one tip for something I must be doing.  What would it be? 

 

So the number one tip for a not for profit association that  wants to get it right  would be to work with an expert and develop a social media strategy for your association. And the reason why I say that is If your goal is just to post to social media,   there may  be no real benefit to it  wanting to just post to social media,  there's an end goal. There's a strategic goal. So the one thing that would be best for a not for profit to do would be to work out what those end goals are, and then develop a social media strategy that is designed to achieve those goals.

 

Such sensible advice. Love it.

 

And that means that once you have that strategy, you can either choose to implement it in house because you'll have a clear idea of how much work's involved, or you can find someone to outsource to. So yeah, knowledge is power in that sense. And so the most valuable thing you could do at the beginning is to invest in a strategy. So. You and the board understand what the goal is, so it's not just to post to social media.

 

Yeah, which I feel is probably the rhetoric inside a lot of association boards. You know, we need to be on it, but without necessarily having a really strong understanding of why. 

 

Absolutely. And  if there's no clear line of sight to the goal, then it's either going to be seen as disposable or too expensive or not important. And it's also not necessarily going to actually achieve any goal for the association. 

 

So that leads me to another thought around analysis, because how do you know if you've achieved a goal? Well, you analyze data. What should people know about analysis of the metrics and what are the metrics? How do they determine whether they're achieving their strategic goals with relation to social media?

 

Yeah, that's a great question and a very interesting one because it depends again on what those strategic goals are. For example, if it's brand awareness, then a metric that might be really important would be  number of followers, number of views, number of engagements.  But if your goal is actually membership, so growing your membership, then it might be number of inquiries that you've received via social media. And there is many, many different metrics that you can measure on social media on the different platforms.  And if you've invested in the social media scheduling software that I mentioned earlier, then that normally comes with inbuilt analytics. Right. So that would be really useful for an association because you may need to have something to present to the board,  and it's very difficult to create a social media report yourself. using the individual platforms by just actually looking at the insights that each platform produces.

 

Yeah.

 

Difficult and messy. So it's easier to actually have a social media scheduling software that generates a report for you. And you can often customize reports and set them up to be delivered to you monthly, for example. So perfect for the board meetings.

 

Yeah. Perfect. I've heard that. Some of the platforms prefer, from an algorithm point of view,  what they call, I think organic content, maybe organically posted. Correct me if I've got that wrong, as opposed to pre scheduled via an external app content. Is that true? 

 

It is and isn't true at the same time. So The content that will perform the best on social media is typically  content that is produced within the app,  an example of that would be reels. Most scheduling software won't schedule reels. They're designed to be created within the Instagram app. And so in that sense, then yes, anything that's actually created within the app and not pre scheduled  will perform better. And this is where our discussion gets complicated because what's more important, is it more important that your content reaches more people, or is it more important that your. Pre batch scheduling your posts and they're all going live and you're efficient and organized and you're regularly posting and communicating.

 

Is that trade off quantifiable? 

 

That's such a tricky question because again it's,  is your goal to get, you know, the, the whole idea of going viral on social media. Everyone loves the idea of going viral. I've gone viral a few times. It doesn't mean that my business has exploded  as a result. It just means that. I've gotten a few more views on my content, which is really nice, but it doesn't mean that I suddenly get a lot more clients wanting to work with me.

 

Yeah. Or knocks on the door. Yeah. Yeah.

 

So whereas you can pre schedule, pre create and batch schedule content that will really resonate with your audience.  If that's your goal, then the social media scheduling software, there's no, there's not a barrier to creating great content.

 

Yeah. What I'm hearing really clearly is that the use of social media, regardless of your strategy and all the rest of it is really at its heart about good communication with the people you want to talk to and you want to have talk with you. So it's really about that genuine connection rather than. A numbers game or posting for the sake of posting. 

 

 That's so true. And  what I've managed to develop over the years is when  a business owner or an executive reaches out to me and they want to work with me, they've generally been following my social media for some time, and they already know what I do and they're 90 percent sold. And they just want to find out what's the cost and how does it work?  That's the goal for an association anyone who's following your content has a really good idea of who you are as an organisation and what you do.  And when they go to sign up as a member, they're already sold because they already  know your values, they know what you offer. And you've communicated that really clearly to them on social media.

 

Yes, I'm so glad you mentioned values the last episode and the one before it were based on mission, vision and values and just how very important that is for setting that scene. And I think it needs to translate across every activity that you undertake, inclusive of social media. You need to really paint a picture and kind of tell a story about  your association, what you're there for, what you stand for. And you can do that online pretty readily, I would think.

 

Absolutely. And  if you send an email that says, here's our  values.  You may not get a huge number of opens,  whereas if you're creating content on social media that communicates your values in more subtle ways, then  it's an easier way to actually get that message through.

 

Yeah. You demonstrate rather than tell. Exactly.

 

Yeah. Very well said.  

 

 And with the board now, I don't want to generalize cause we're not about that here, but it's not uncommon. that association boards are made up of people who maybe, shall we say, haven't grown up as native social media users. I think you get my point. If you are an executive officer and you want to implement a social media plan and strategy, but your board just doesn't get it,  have you got any experience in sort of getting that across the line any tips for,  justifying.  The need and  the value. in at least experimenting and dipping a toe in the water of social media?

 

Absolutely. What I would be doing in that situation is I would be explaining to the board that what I mentioned to you before, 80 percent of the Australian population is spending time on social media every day. So you'd be very, very silly not to, and it's mostly  Especially if you manage it in house, it's mostly free. It's not going to be entirely free because it's time, but it is actually a low cost way of reaching your desired audience and nurturing your members and keeping them happy. I would be tapping into what the board really cares about, which is a membership and sponsorship probably primarily, and then be retention. So attracting members and sponsors and then retaining them. It is. A very, very powerful way of doing so and to go a step further and maybe to give them some evidence because they might go, okay, yeah, that's fine, but I'm still not convinced. I would actually be showing them examples of either their members or their sponsors already being really active on social media. And it's highly likely that is the case.  Or showing them examples of other associations who have built a really amazing presence. Most obvious one that comes to mind is the Landscape Association in New South Wales, who have a very large presence on Instagram and Facebook. And that will show the value and the power so they do need that little bit of extra convincing of the value of being on those platforms.

 

And you, mentioned Landscape Association and obviously we're both very familiar, given our backgrounds  with those sorts of accounts, they are really incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Is that a prerequisite to effectively utilise social media? I mean, if you're a,  society of lawyers or doctors, as I mentioned before where are the pretty pictures coming from? 

 

Well, if you're a society of lawyers and doctors, I might be going, maybe I shouldn't necessarily be putting all my eggs into the Instagram basket, and maybe I should be actually hanging out on LinkedIn.

 

So LinkedIn, for those of you who might have a little bit of an understanding of how those different platforms look and operate on LinkedIn, for example, even dare I say it, X slash

Twitter, the the new version of Twitter, they are less image heavy, and they're more about the actual content that you're creating. So again, if you're thinking, okay, I don't necessarily have the imagery that's going to perform really well on Instagram, then maybe I'll head over to LinkedIn at all. X or maybe again, what we were discussing earlier, it's not about the likes. It's,  it's about engaging with your audience and if your audience cares about the content that you're producing, they're not going to care if it's pretty, they're going to get value out of it in other ways.

 

But In the landscape industry, it's all about pretty gardens, beautiful gardens.

 

Absolutely. Yeah. Very beautiful. And I guess the reels and those member testimonials and,  imagery from, for example, events or whatever  those societies might be. Undertaking and involved in outside of social media is probably going to be fodder for that social media feed.

 

Exactly. Yeah, that's correct.  Very good. Well, look, we've come to the end, but I just wanted to say clearly, you've got a huge amount of knowledge around social media, but also beautifully a heap of knowledge around not for profit association management itself.  How can people work with you? 

 

Thank you, Julie.

 

I do have a unique background in that sense.  I work one to one with executives. or business owners.  And the way that it works is that we'd initially have a discovery call, which is just a 30 minute zoom call to make sure that we're a great fit. So I'd listen to what you're struggling with or what you want to achieve and make sure that I've got the resources to deliver a strategy for you. And it is one to one support. So we meet once a month and we set goals, we set a 90 day plan and we one by one tick items off. The list that I create for you to make sure that we're making progress.  And I will actually develop social media content plans for you. So if that's something that you don't feel like you have the resources for in house, then I can provide an, administration assistant, for example, with a calendar that they can then create social media posts from.

 

Right.

 

So yes, and in terms of booking in for a discovery call, you can find me on social media. Isn't that? No way.  That is good to know.  Yes. If you look up Ambition Social on social media on Instagram, you will find me and there's links to book a discovery call there.

 

Fabulous. And I will put all of those links in the show notes for today's episode, but yeah, check it out at Ambition Social.

 

Thank you, Julie.

 

You've got such a wealth of knowledge. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share it with me and with our listeners today. And  thank you so, so much for your generosity. 

 

Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Julie. I love talking to you and really appreciated this chat.

 

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