Our social media profile is growing!
Did you know 3.2 billion people are active on social media daily? That’s 42 per cent of the global population—and one of the reasons why, on 1 July 2018, the CRCWSC kicked off a focused strategy to build our social media profile. One year on, we’re seeing strong results.
As an organisation, we knew social media could help us boost our reputation as a social enterprise, thought leader, influencer and commercial partner/service provider, and raise the profile of our researchers, research outcomes and intellectual property assets. We also knew that social media success takes strategy and planning, so early in 2018 we developed a social media plan and policy, conducted in-house training, and developed our new social media content calendar to start FY1819.
For the past 12 months, we’ve posted regularly on Twitter and LinkedIn about our own work, and shared interesting news, events and outputs from the water sensitive space. We were particularly prolific during the 4th Water Sensitive Cities Conference in March, and we’re fortunate to have great social media buy-in among senior executive and other staff.
This year was about finding our feet and getting more comfortable with using social media to build our presence online—and now we’re reaping the rewards.
On follower numbers alone, our strategy has been successful: we’ve more than doubled our LinkedIn followers (from 524 to 1082) and increased our Twitter followers by 27% (from 1398 to 1774). Admittedly, we started from a low base, but other stats confirm we’re headed in the right direction:
As any regular social media user knows, building a social media profile takes time and a commitment to producing quality content and monitoring metrics and trends. We’re now looking ahead to what’s possible for us in social media in the coming 12 months. One priority will be to add more video content to our YouTube channel, since Cisco reports 86% of web traffic will be claimed by video this year.