For some time now I have been thinking that while Facebook has been a great community builder for our club, it may not be the platform that we will spend most of our time on in the future. LinkedIn is great, we are a corporate club, corporates hang-out on LinkedIn. But I think if we only focused on one other platform, apart from Facebook, we would be ‘placing all our eggs in one basket’, and that’s not a good thing.

Twitter

A long time ago, long before I started to look after the club’s social media, in 2012 a Twitter account was created for Rotary Melbourne. @RotaryMelbourne was abandoned shortly after that from what I can tell. After spending some time thinking about it, I decided we should increase our activity on Twitter for the following reasons:

• Twitter has a lot of interesting people who have accounts on it.
• Politicians, academics, students, publishers, government departments, and advocacy groups (Think prospective speakers and members, partners for future projects).
• You can get the latest news on Twitter quickly.

If you think Twitter isn't popular, you're wrong. Barack Obama has 129.5M Followers on Twitter. You can find his account @BarackObama

Rotary International has 336.3K Followers, go to @RotaryInternational and check it out. At the time of writing, the LinkedIn account for RI had 146,073. Whilst we shouldn’t compare numbers, what we should do is understand that some platforms are more dynamic than others. We shouldn’t take it for granted that what is available to us online today will be the same in a years time.

For this reason I recommend you all follow Rotary Melbourne on Twitter

To start, go to Twitter.com

1. Either create an account or log in to your existing account. If you have forgotten your password, click on the right-hand side, type your email address, and click search.

    2. Once you arrive at this screen type in NEXT, or click 'Don't have access to these?'

3. Click on next, and you will get to the next screen:

• Follow the instructions, reset your password and you’re in.
• If you don’t have an account, just click on sign up, half way down the screen and follow the prompts to create your own account.
• Once you are in, find @RotaryMelbourne and click  follow

Remember to 'Like', 'Retweet', 'Tweet' and 'Comment'. Do the same for other profiles that interest you. The theory is the same for all our other social media accounts.

Should we give up on Facebook?

Back to Facebook. Should we give it up? No. The reason we should not, just yet, is because we have a community of over 2,000 Followers, and while that does not seem like much - it’s good. We can build this community and generate interest in our club’s events and projects.

But, as I have stated earlier,  we just can't assume that Facebook will always be a platform that will be suitable for us in the future.

What you can do to promote our club

Follow Rotary Melbourne on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as well as Twitter

If we Like, Share, and Comment on each other's posts, then we maximise the reach everything we post will have.

We shouldn't hide our light under a bushel, if we don't beat our own drum how can we expect others to follow?

Feel free to share your thoughts with me.

Thank you,

Ari Talantis"

Share this with your friends