Best Social Media Platforms for Social CEOs

Zoe Amar and Matt Collins invited me to write a chapter for their guide, "Social Media for Charity Leaders", as part of their project revealing the top 30 charity CEOs on social media. I wrote a chapter on The Best Social Platforms for CEOs", which you can find below. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can read Zoe’s article in the Guardian – "Five characteristics of the top 30 charity CEOs on social media" – or follow the #SocialCEOs hashtag on Twitter.

The number of social media platforms grows every year, but as a charity CEO there are only a few that need to be on your radar.

You don’t need to be on every available platform, from Google+ to Pinterest to Instagram – it’s better to do a couple of social media platforms really well than many of them mediocrely.

Where should you start?

Your proficiency on social media will develop naturally over time, so it can be useful to start with a channel where you can control your output more, compared to some of the more open or conversational platforms.

It’s not thought of as a traditional social media channel, yet starting a blog can be a great way to communicate your vision and share your charity’s
stories with your supporters.

Although one of the main uses of a CEO blog is to engage with employees as well as customers or supporters, a charity CEO blog will have greater impact with external audiences.

A recent study showed that CEOs who blog reach external stakeholder groups better than on other kinds of social media platforms (see Weber Shandwicks’ Social CEO Study).

"It’s better to do a couple of social media platforms really well than many of them mediocrely."

Twitter can be the most helpful platform for quickly and easily building relationships with your employees, donors, supporters and the media.

If you haven’t used Twitter before, it can be a daunting prospect to start tweeting.

But you don’t have to tweet as soon as you’ve set up your profile – listening is just as important.

First of all, just spend some time finding interesting people and organisations to follow and start listening. Get a feel for the conversations and community etiquette.

Seek out your Twitter expert

If you want to start tweeting more regularly, spend an hour with one of your charity’s Twitter champions and get them to set Twitter up on your phone and computer.

They can show you how to find and follow new people, what search terms you’d like to keep track of, and best practice for engaging with people.

Top tip: make sure you know where the ‘new tweet’ field is and where the search field is. You don’t want to ‘do an Ed Balls’ and tweet your own name instead of searching for it!