Social media strategy

Last updated: 4th October, 2023

We recommend you go to this section to view tips, templates, and content for EA groups' social media marketing. That page also contains graphics your group can use to market your group. If you don’t find what you’re looking for in this and elsewhere on the resource centre, please reach out to unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org and we can share some further resources we give to participants of UGAP and OSP on outreach.

Creating a social media guide for your group can help your group think through the goals of your social media use, and track what works well for your group. This can especially be helpful:

For example, see EA Ankara's guide which also includes practical advice to keep in mind, especially about tone and language. See also this example from EA Turkey of a long-form guide to their principles for communication or the template from CEA for planning social media and communications campaigns. See the chart below for an example of a strategy.

Groups can help facilitate discussion between members. We recommend creating a private, visible group, which allows people to find the group by searching on Facebook. People have to request to join the group, and group member lists and discussions are only viewable by members of the group.

You can set up the group so that people requesting to join must answer up to three questions. These questions can help gauge their understanding of EA, interest in meeting with you or others, and inclinations toward specific cause areas. These questions also help you scan out for potential spammers.

We recommend a tidy, appealing cover image set to the dimensions of a Facebook cover photo, as well as a friendly description for your group. We also recommend editing the group URL to words instead of numbers, and marking important messages as “Announcements” so they appear on the top of the group’s page.

Generally, pages take less effort to maintain than groups. Only admins can post, and posts aren’t tied to Facebook users. People can directly message page admins using Facebook Messenger. Aim to provide regular updates or posts on things like events and donation opportunities, as well as engage followers of the page by replying to comments and messages.

Email mailing lists are usually the most important communication method, excluding direct individual messages. They also are necessary to communicate with members who aren’t on active on social media. You can keep lists of emails in mailing platforms like MailChimp or Flodesk; these platforms also track the open rates and clicks on emails you send.

You can set up an email address with an EA domain name if you’d like to send emails from an EA-branded email, but we’d recommend using your personal email at the start (to keep on top of responses).

A regular newsletter with events, job openings, and local group happenings can help members keep up to date and engaged with your group. We recommend a newsletter if you have a large enough mailing list since smaller groups might be able to share links more informally through a group chat or Facebook group. Try to keep newsletters relatively short (up to five items of news) and place your most important content at the top of the email.

Instagram is a lesser-used platform by many EA groups, which may be due to its limits and challenges. However, it can be a valuable platform especially for new local groups established in countries or places (eg. universities) where it is highly popular.

Disadvantages:

Suggestions:

Websites are particularly good for large groups and national groups, to create a professional online presence that can be found through a Google search. However, we don’t recommend university groups to focus large amount of time on these because students will often use social media far more.

Rob Wiblin’s guide to promoting ideas on social media covers what to post, how to share it, and a few do’s and don’ts.

You can find articles to post from these places:

Articles relating to trending topics tend to get more attention, but consider if they are relevant to EA. You may prefer fewer clicks but from people who are more interested (and having them become more inclined towards EA), than for lots of people to engage, but only superficially.

Luca from EA Hungary and Dewi from EA Cambridge are available to help groups that would like a short video to promote their group. They’ve created a general EA video and can add on specific to your group. Contact Luca at bontaluca@gmail.com if you're interested.