Social media round-up for charities – #7

Welcome to our seventh social media round-up! We’ve scoured the internet to find and curate the latest social media news – and what it means for your charity.

1. LinkedIn groups are back

Back in January LinkedIn sent an email to group admins to let them know that they were working on fully rebuilding groups and reintegrating it into the main LinkedIn website and mobile app. Last week they announced that they are rolling out the new features at the end of August. So what can you expect?

According to the email from LinkedIn, they are:

• Making it easier to access Groups right from the LinkedIn homepage and improving the visibility of group conversations in the main LinkedIn feed
• Giving you the ability to manage your group on the go in the LinkedIn iOS and Android apps
• Helping you stay up-to-date on group activity through Notifications
• Enabling richer conversations with the ability to reply to comments, edit posts and comments, and post native video

One thing that will be going was the ability to email blast group members as this led to lots of spam and people then not engaging with groups, due to many of them being self-promotional. The improved features should hopefully lead to people wanting to engage again with relevant groups. And, with one of the new features being that your group post conversations will be visible on your newsfeed, this should drive activity.

2. Facebook introduces new badges for groups

Speaking of groups, Facebook has recently introduced a few new badges for groups. Last year they introduced an admin badge so that admins could be easily identifiable in posts and comments. Now they’ve added a ‘conversation starter’ badge, which is awarded to people who regularly post in the group, and is displayed in their group profile and beside their name when posting and commenting within the group. For those people who are a bit competitive, this might spur them on to earn a Conversation Starter badge, leading to greater activity.

3. Wakelet is the new Storify

Mourning the loss of Storify? Well, the good news is that Wakelet is here. It’s very similar to Storify in that it allows you to collect, organise and save content whilst telling a story. It’s free too! You can create a bunch of collections (public or private), which in turn can tell a bigger story – like this one from The Rohingya Crisis.

4. Instagram introduces a question feature to Sstories

Instagram has introduced a new feature for stories which allows you to post a question to your followers. Here’s one from WWF Singapore who were running a competition for young people to represent Singapore as their ‘Panda Ambassador’ at The Arctic Youth Summit in Finland. They posted a series of stories about the competition and to enter they needed to submit a video of themselves. One of the stories asked if they had any questions and they then posted the answers to those questions so all other entrants could see them.

It’s a great way to engage supporters and find out more about them, test a campaign idea or answer their questions.

Interesting Reads

Here are the posts that caught our attention this month. Grab a cuppa and catch up with more interesting social media stories and resources.

Facebook subscriptions and content monetisation
The New York Public Library is turning classics into Instagram stories 
3 reasons why Pinterest is still relevant for nonprofits
YouTube to crack down on fake news, backing ‘authoritative’ sources
5 things learnt from the Childline #UnderstandMe campaign

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