As you know, LightBox Collaborative is aiming to be even more collaborative this year. One way we are going to accomplish this is by having a different LightBox Collaborator curate our social media every month to spur conversation, share fresh ideas and highlight terrific client work.
Whether it’s via a quick photo share on Instagram, or as thorough as spinning out your best ideas on Medium, social media is full of opportunities. And that much opportunity can feel overwhelming.
So what do you do? Get focused through solid strategy and use tools like our social media calendar. But don’t forget to collaborate!
We’ve said it before, but it deserves saying again: in order to get your message out, you need to have more than a communications team. You need a team that communicates.
By collaborating with your team on social media, you will not only gain capacity, but you will gain new perspectives, networks, and followers, as well as fresh ideas for what, when, and where to share. Naturally folks will need to keep to topics that support your mission, vision and programming, but we all have slightly different emphases in our work and this can show through what news you share, what you photos you post, and the platforms you use.
For example, on our team, though we all have strategic communications experience, our interests are actually quite varied. The organizers are always looking for inspiration for how to motivate people to action. The message mavens dig into the latest public opinion data and what cognitive linguists are telling us about language choices. Those of us who focus more on public relations keep close tabs on the media. And then there’s facilitation, organizational development, and the list goes on…
In other words, we all nerd out in different ways, and in the coming months you will get a chance to see more social media content that reflects our various deep dives into the work that we do, and the work that you do too.
We would love to learn more about your world by seeing how the different folks on your team—staff, volunteers, donors, clients and constituents—communicate about the work that you do and the way that you do it. So get to it—collaborate to add capacity and to create more and more varied content.
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Photo courtesy of Flickr user NOAA’s National Ocean Service
Amanda Cooper is a LightBox collaborator, GAME Plan generator, and message maestro.