When we start Directory refresh projects, we always ask: “do you actively maintain social media channels associated with this site?”
We recently met with the Trafford Directory team who, it turns out, have a very active and well established process around social media.
“For our FIS & SENDIASS social media channels, we tend to steer our information towards parents/ carers, but we like to make some of our children’s activity posts more appealing to children/ young people with the images and graphics we use.
We use Hootsuite to make, schedule and post content onto Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, making around 30 posts per week on a wide range of topics.
We chose Twitter & Facebook because lots of parents use them. Instagram is used because there is a wider audience out there which ranges from the young to the elderly… plus the posts are easy to interact with.”
Alex Heald | Kick-start Trainee | FIS | Trafford Council
Social Media has a unique reach. You could hold a list of email contacts for every SEND family in your area but they probably won’t all thank you for emailing them every week with news and events. Updates on social media are different because the user chooses to go and look at their feed.
A key to marketing anything is to understand your audience. What age group does your Directory reach? What devices do they use to visit your site? How often do they return to your site? Let’s be honest, the greatest Directory site on Earth is never going to be revisited more frequently that someone’s favourite social media feed!
We’ve found lots of slightly differing statistics, but generally they all show that nationally, about 7 in 10 of the population are on social media and that Facebook still has the biggest reach by far.
Out of 45 million UK social media users, 43 million use Facebook. The most common age group on Facebook and on Instagram are 25 to 34 years old. The notion that the younger crowd has totally ditched Facebook isn’t quite true but it’s definitely not the under 30’s #1 platform.
According to the studies, if you want to reach teenagers, you’re just gonna have to investigate TikTok 😉
References:
https://www.avocadosocial.com/the-uk-social-media-statistics-for-2021/
https://www.statista.com/topics/3236/social-media-usage-in-the-uk/
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/