This post will be short, messy, and unstructured. The main scope is not to go into the details of what we are doing, but just to let the community know that we are doing something that as far as we know hasn't been done in the past. In the next few weeks, I will probably work on two more detailed articles, one to officially present my project and one to explain the details of this social media idea.
A brief personal introduction: I am an ex-management consultant. I have two years of experience as a rationalist Instagram content creator with a pretty good track record (280 posts, thousands of stories, and 18.000 followers - all in Italian). I am also part of the EA Italy board and thanks to an Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund grant now I am expanding my project on YouTube and other social media, working on it full time.
Since January I decided to leverage on the experience that I described to try to develop a coherent, scalable and replicable social media strategy for EA Chapters. Together with Luca Stocco (EA Italy) and Luisa Sophie Gullino (EA Italy and EA Oxford), we worked ≈2 months for ≈4 hours per week to develop a strategy. Last week we launched our two first IG pilots - EA Italy and EA Oxford. We will probably launch another pilot in Spanish.
The actual social media presence of EA local chapters is not coherent, there haven't been many successful cases and there isn't a coordinated strategy to do social media outreach on a local level. We want to fill these gaps. This is our model:
- Test a unified content creation approach in several chapters, initially on Instagram
- Gather data and see what works and what doesn't
- Leverage these insights to modify our strategy
- Eventually expand our presence into other social media (e.g. TikTok, Linkedin, Quora, etc.)
- Repeat
We want to develop a methodology that is agile, easy to manage and that will not require too much effort from the different chapter's Social Media Managers. Our final goal is to grow the local EA groups by engaging new people on social media.
As I said I will elaborate more on what we are doing in a future post and this is just a sketchy intro to our plan. Anyone that is interested to hear more can contact me.
Sending this to my local EA group leader!
These are great news, and I find it extremely useful that you're giving a brief update since we've had discussions about opening an Instagram account recently. If you'd like to start another pilot, EA Israel would be happy to collaborate.
This sounds great! PISE, the group at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) has also been trying to this over the past two years. Although it's far from perfect, I think we have a pretty good branding and online presence (especially compared to the average EA group). Feel free to check out our Instagram, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the people who do the hard work of creating great marketing content :)
I wrote a facebook social media management guide for the Israel community that some have found useful, would love people comments- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PssOiZn3JnQhWw-zAcl7--CDNWFtOmV0mmuH-qeH3cE/edit?usp=sharing (I'm the Ea Israel community manager)
I'm curious. Are there any disadvantages of having a whole bunch of chapters posting the same content? Is it likely to get these pages marked as producing spam?
It's a good question. The contents will not be the same, the strategy will. The idea is to enable different chapters to create content independently following common guidelines and best practices (in terms of graphics, tone of voice, etc).
To add on what Luca said—so far we have been indeed using similar content for the two Instagram pages that we manage, solely because the posts are written in different languages (English and Italian), hence there is little overlap amongst the audiences. Whilst we could indeed use similar content for a future page in Spanish, this would not be the case if other EA pages in English were to be created. I hope this helps!
Have you got anything to share yet? I'm writing a post on social media strategy and would love to see anything you have made.
Excited to see the results Luca!!