 Thank you for joining us for Accomplishing More with Social Media. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global, and I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Our presenter today is Pierre Croant who has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry leading several technology ventures, successful mergers and acquisitions, and founded People on the Go in 2001, which is one of TechSoup's donor partners. His Accomplishing More with Leadership Program helps today's leaders develop the awareness and behaviors needed to focus on results and develop people in the midst of the information overload that we all live in today. He has a best-selling work called Accomplishing More with Less Workshop and has also created some books to go with this time for leadership, Accomplishing More with Less Workbook, and the results curve, as well as the new inbox. So he helps people deal with all of this technology that we're bombarded with all day long. And I will say I've attended a couple of his trainings in the past, and boy, helped me clean out my inbox in crazy ways that make it much, much more manageable. So I would recommend checking out his resources from People on the Go. You'll also see in the background assisting with the chat, Ali Bestekian. So feel free to reach out to her at any time. She'll be grabbing your questions and helping you with tech issues. We're all located here in San Francisco. I set through TechSoup headquarters and Pierre at his office for People on the Go. Go ahead and chat in to let us know from where you're joining today. While you do that, I'm going to go ahead and give us a quick look at today's agenda. I'll do a fast introduction to TechSoup for those of you who aren't familiar with our work already. We'll have a couple of poll questions where we ask you what you're currently using and how you feel about social media already. Then Pierre will take us through the different ways we can leverage social media, talk about his framework for using it effectively. Then he'll actually show us live demos of these different platforms. Keep in mind we're not going to cover every social media channel out there today. We're going to primarily focus on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs. We know that there's Snapchat, and Kik, and Instagram, and Tumblr, and all kinds of other ones out there. But these are the ones we're going to focus on today. And with the assumption that many of you may be pretty new or not have a very defined strategy. So if you're really experienced with social media, we encourage you to share that experience in the chat so we can put that back out to our audience. But you may find that we're starting at the beginning for a lot of these topics today based on your feedback in those participant polls. He'll give us some action plan, tools, and additional resources, and we'll also have time for Q&A. Thanks everyone for chiming in to let me know where you're joining from. It looks like we have people from all over the world and the country. So we're glad to have you on the line. Right now we have around 260 people joining. And we are here at TechSoup Global, a network of 63 partner NGOs from around the world serving organizations in more than 120 countries. We do that in a variety of ways from face-to-face meetups where you see all these little green dots. Those are Netscred local groups you can find in your communities. And we also have served 615,000 NGOs around the world with our technology, donations, and product programs where we partner with companies like People on the Go, or Microsoft, or Adobe to bring donated technologies to nearly the tune of $5 billion. And you can learn more about those programs at TechSoup.org. Now on to these poll questions that I mentioned earlier. Go ahead and click on your screen. You can select any of these and indicate which of the following social media channels you are using already and regularly. You want to get an idea of who is really already invested in different channels. And some folks saying that they also use Instagram. A couple of people mentioning Pinterest. That's great. I'm on both of those personally. I don't use them very much for work. And we don't ask for distinction here so much, but some of you may use these more for personal purposes and others may use it more for professional purposes. And Pierre will talk a little bit about that later on. It's the other folks mentioning Periscope and Snapchat, Tumblr. So we'll leave just a couple more seconds for everyone to participate in the poll. And then I'll go ahead and show the results. It looks like Facebook has nearly all of us participating. It is sort of the world's photo album these days. We are all on it in some degree or another posting our social lives and our photos and our updates about what we're doing every day. I'd be interested to know what the division is though for people who are using it specifically for work purposes compared to personal and how much you divide. We're not going to ask that question directly in a poll, but I'm going to go ahead and open the next one to get a feeling for how you view social media. How do you feel about it? And specifically for your organization, not your personal life here. So do you think social media is really important for engaging your audience for your organization? Amy comments in the chat that it's a necessary evil. I kind of like that. Some days I feel like I want to disengage and deactivate all of my social media accounts. Other days I feel like it's the best place I want to hang out all day. Katie comments that she's using Facebook and Twitter but not very well. And I imagine that may be many of us when it comes to work. Some folks are commenting it's a great way to build community, but not necessarily always advertise. Definitely feels challenging to keep up all the time. So these are great sentiments to be sharing because I think we all feel sometimes very overwhelmed with how we can keep up with it or how it actually makes a real difference in our impact and connecting with people. So I'm going to show the results for this one. And then we're going to go ahead and have Pierre come on the line. Most people feel like it's very important for engaging their audience and some feel that it's somewhat helpful. And lots of other comments coming in the chat. Nobody has said that it's totally unnecessary. So those of you who haven't voted yet and you want to be different, you can click on that one. I'm going to go ahead and have Pierre join us on the line. So he can talk to us a bit about his framework and take us through how to accomplish more with social media today. Welcome to the program Pierre. We're so glad to have you join us. Thank you Becky. I'm so much looking forward to today's session. I'm going to start with sharing my screen here. And let me also enlarge this. All right, so I'm very much looking forward to today's session. And thank you for all your answers for those two brief questions we asked you. That's great to know. And I'm going to let you know we have a couple of prizes today. I'm going to give a couple copies of my books for the person who's going to tell me at the end of this session, how many times did they use the word relevant? So the word of the day is relevant. I used it twice already. So start counting if you want to be part of this little contest at the end of this session. The other thing I want to mention for those who are on Twitter already, I'm going to add one more hashtag to the hashtag that Becky already indicated and that is social tips now. So this is our hashtag for the session today. So feel free to use it. And for those who haven't done many hashtags, we will talk a little later about them. So what do you think these people and brands have in common? Well, maybe there are many things they have in common. But the one thing that I'm interested in is that they are all using social media very effectively. So social media as you all know have right now millions of users, hundreds of millions of users in each of the platforms. And guess who these users are? They are your donors. They are your volunteers. They are your beneficiaries. They are your partners. They are your friends and your family members. So it makes so much sense that for us to be quite engaged on it and try to connect with all these audiences in effective ways and ways that are relevant to our mission and our goals and our causes. So that's what today's session is about. I'd like to start with a little bit of a question for you and invite you to take a look at this list and make a list of maybe three items that you see on this list that you think are your most important applications for social media. So make that list on the side, jot those down someplace. And then as we go through the session I also recommend you keep that in mind especially after the session as you go back and start to implement some of what we talked about today and see if you can focus more on those applications. So I'll give you a few more seconds to think about it, make your choices, and then I'll move on. Okay, so now the platforms you want to talk about today are those four. As Becky mentioned earlier, there are many, many, many social media platforms. And the reason I'm focusing on these four because these are the most popular, the essential, that's where a lot of the work would go. And obviously as you build that social media presence in these platforms you can start to branch out and leverage the other platforms. But with the time we have today we're going to focus on these. And I'm going to follow something we call the accomplishing more with social media framework. So in this framework there are four phases that we would recommend for people to go through in order to create more of a compelling social media presence. One is the phase of learning which is learning about the platform. Second is listening, observing what's happening there, who's who, what people do, and then starting to experiment. And then finally stepping back and thinking what is my goal and starting to influence specific audiences that we're engaged with. So I'm going to walk you through these today in probably briefly but enough to give you a good feel for these phases. And then hopefully you'll take on this effort of continuing this. And at the end of the session I'll give you a little sample action plan on how you can help yourself continue and make this something that's ongoing. Now I know many of you are using all these platforms really well already so it could be an opportunity for you to get some more insights, maybe step back and rethink some things. And it seems like also many of you are new or haven't done much in them. So for you it's going to be really hopefully an eye-opener on what you can do and how much you can accomplish. So let's start with Twitter and we're in the first learn phase right now. So I'm going to walk you through a bunch of Twitter features. The first four ones here are really the basics. So for those of you who have been on Twitter which seems about half of our audience today you're already using Twitter and you're familiar with all this. So I'm going to go through them quickly just to make sure we're all on the same page and those who haven't been much on Twitter they have these basics. And then the really important part I want to get to as soon as possible is the using of the hashtags, the searching, and the using of the lists which is the more important part. But let's start with the basics first. Let's go to Twitter. That's not the one we want. And what I'd like to do in Twitter is this. First, this is my home page and I'd like to tell my followers that I am presenting about social media at a TechSoup webinar. So you can see here it helps me and gives me some help as I compose my tweet. And I might even add the link to today's session. And you notice here this was 140 when I started. Now it's 69. So that tells me there are 69 characters left. And it shortens the URLs now automatically so I don't have to worry about this. And then if I go ahead and tweet this, and by the way for those who aren't familiar with the whole terminology here, tweet meaning just to post this. If I go ahead and tweet it, and let me go ahead and do this, it's going to show up on my home page but it's going to also show up on the home pages of all my followers. And now this appears to be so simple and so obvious and so something not worth talking about. But actually it is. And let me tell you why because this is the core way in which social media works and that's why we're here today. Because what happens now, all my followers saw this. They get to know more about TechSoup. So anyway I'm helping promote TechSoup. They got to know about me and that I speak about social media. Maybe they know that I speak about time management and leadership but they haven't heard me speak about social media so I'm in a way promoting also what I'm doing. And I'm also adding value to them because those in my network, the people who are following me and who happen to be either in nonprofits or they have friends and relatives or maybe colleagues in nonprofits, they learned about TechSoup. They learned about this presentation. They may forward this to others. And so anyway if we were to think about this, this is what's happening. I'm putting information out there. My network gets to know more about whatever it is I'm sharing about in this case TechSoup in the webinar today. They get to know more about me. If they like that, they think it's valuable and relevant. They're going to forward this to their network and then that's what they get to know about TechSoup and me. And then they forward it and on and on. This is the core of social media. And the reason this is in this case useful is because I'm putting out something that is relevant. None of this would work if I put out trivial information, chit-chatty things. And if I'm not connected with the people who are relevant to my mission and the topics and the issues that I'm interested in, an issue we're going to revisit very, very soon. Okay, so back to here and we got this tweeting thing out of the way. Now a few more things I want to show you before we talk about the hashtag which is where I want to get to quickly is the reply and retweet and direct messages. So retweet is really simple. Let's say one of you looks at this and says, oh okay, that's really something that could be useful to my audience, to the people you're following. You could retweet this. So retweeting is pretty much like forwarding the message in email. I guess I can't retweet my own. So retweeting is like forwarding the message, thank you Mark by the way, forwarding the message to my followers. So when I retweet somebody else's tweet that means I am posting it on my home page and all my followers are going to see it. Which means that not only you're sharing information with your network but also you're in a way acknowledging the person that you are retweeting and creating a rapport with them. So if you really want to get in touch with influencers, people who may provide value to you in some way, start to see what they're doing there and start retweeting them and that's the way to start that relationship. So retweeting is very powerful. Replying can also be quite powerful. Replying will copy the handle of the person you're replying to and allows you to compose your reply here and then you can tweet your reply. Now your reply is not private so this is more available out there. If you really want to send a private message, then you wouldn't reply, you would probably go and send a direct message. A direct message is private. They will only get it. They are going to see it in their messages and they will be able to reply back to you also in a private way. So these are the basics and we graduated from the basics quickly to make sure everyone is on the same page. And now let's really get to the core of what Twitter is about and talk about these three capabilities. I'm going to start with the hashtag. I'm going to go back and give you a little example. So let's say some of you are on Twitter right now and you would like to share some tips from today's session with your followers who may be interested in this topic. So you might put something like, Speaker says, social media is no longer a nice to have. It is a necessity. Now this is a very simple tweet and I think you probably can already think about ways to make it better. I know all those tweeters out there on the call today are thinking, oh, we can really make this better. So for instance, you can add here the actual speaker handle. We call this handle in Twitter. It's like your email address in email. In Twitter we call it handle. You may also indicate whether the speaker speaking is at that TechSoup webinar. And then you might also add a hashtag. Remember the hashtag I gave you earlier? Social tips now. So typically at a presentation the speaker would give you a hashtag about the topic they are talking about so that during the presentation everyone would use that hashtag. So what is a hashtag? So a hashtag is simply like a keyword that identifies the topic that is discussed here. So that's all what it is. It's really simple, but it's a very powerful thing in Twitter because if now all of you are tweeting today's tip using this hashtag, what's going to happen is at the end of the session if you go search anyone who goes and search for social media tips now, and by the way please feel free to do that to use this hashtag to tweet things because in a few minutes I'd like to search for this and see how many tips we've collected so far and I think that would be a good way to experience this live right now. But let me finish the discussion about the hashtags first. So someone who goes and searches for social tips now is going to be able to see all the tips we collected today. Not just the tips, the comments maybe that you added, the additional details you may have provided, your opinion on certain things. So it's going to be like a very nice little knowledge base that's all together ready for someone, one of us or maybe one of our followers to just go through and in five minutes they can probably get what happened in the session today. So this is the power of this hashtag. Think of Twitter without hashtags. It would be these little messages scattered everywhere that have no relationship. The hashtag creates that relationship. It creates more context. It really transforms how we look at the information in Twitter. Now let's take this a step further and say, you know, let's say one morning you get up and you're working on this important proposal, this grant proposal and you need some additional help with certain pieces of it or you have some question that if you get an answer for you'll really be in a much better position. So you could start a tweet, put that question in it and include your own hashtag that you assign that will represent that topic or that issue. And now if you're connected with people who are relevant, if you've done your homework, you're following some of the influentials in this area and who are maybe subject matter experts, they're going to notice this question and they're likely, some of them are likely to respond and now their followers are going to see this and they're going to see this hashtag and they're likely to respond also using the hashtag. So now you've got also this small knowledge base that can help you with your current immediate needs. And so that is Twitter. And then beyond this even, and this is kind of a reflection I invite you to think about whatever is the cause you're working on right now or the problem you're trying to solve today or whatever information you're seeking, it's likely that there are many people around the world who are doing something in this field or in this area or have the answer or have done what you're trying to do. So doesn't it make sense to be connected to these people in these platforms so we're not reinventing the wheel with leveraging what everybody else is doing and sharing ideas and sharing knowledge and multiplying our ability to move things forward. So that's why we really need to be in these platforms but doing some specific things which we'll get to. Okay, so now let's go back and talk about searching quickly and then using the lists and then we're going to move on to some conceptual things about where do you take it from here before we move on to Facebook and LinkedIn. So in terms of search, we all think of search as belonging to Google. Well, you may want to rethink that because the social media platforms they are amazing databases of things that are current. And actually Google search these platforms as well. So when you go to Google and search you're getting some results from these platforms as well. But you can go directly to the source if for instance you need to know what's happening right now in a certain field or in certain area or at a certain conference or event that you know is happening but you're not there. So you can go search for that event or conference or subject matter. Maybe it's going back to the example of grant proposal writing. And I'm going to get all the tweets and the people and everything that mentions grant proposal writing. So that's very informative because now you can go see who's who, what events are happening, who are the subject matter experts, etc. So this is very powerful to start to use the search here not just to search for people and their handles which is the obvious thing that we tend to do but also to search for just general or specific topics or issues or events that we're interested in. So search very powerful and not only for people and handles and hashtags but also for specific searches that you're interested in. Now the list is very powerful probably one of the least leveraged features in Twitter but one of the very powerful ones and that's the one that can help you make your use of Twitter very relevant. So for instance, let me first talk about it a little bit and then I'll tell you how this could help. So if I go to lists which is something you can easily access from your profile you can see here that I created some lists for people that I think I want to check out what they're doing in marketing. Our faculty members, we have around 8 faculty members who teach some of our courses so I'm interested in keeping in touch with them and seeing what they're up to. So I created these lists, very easy to create a list by the way all you have to do is just create a new list, give it a name and then make it public or private. Public means other people will see it when they go to your profile and they can also subscribe to it. Private means no one will see it, you're the only one who can benefit from it. So you create your list and then you go find people and add them to the list. Now I did that for my faculty members and now I can quickly go here and see only the tweets from my faculty members. So basically I've segmented my audience into small segments based on context or some other criteria and I can very easily and quickly see what's going on with them at a glance because otherwise their tweets are going to be mixed up on my home page with all the other thousand plus people I have in there and that's going to be very difficult to follow. So for you it could be interesting to consider, let me go back to the list, having a list for your volunteers, a list for maybe board members, a list for donors, a list for partners, etc. and this way you can monitor these very closely in minutes and do this maybe once or twice a week, just check out what are they up to and that can be helpful information for creating rapport with them, for contacting them in a different way instead of very generically and continue to build relationships and even generate some next actions with them. So using lists can be a long way and they can Twitter much more useful. Okay, so I'm going to move now to the next section. I'm going to check actually with Becky if maybe we can take a couple of questions Becky now before we move on but probably just couple and quickly not the long ones because it has still a lot to cover and I'd like to make sure we cover as much as possible in this session. Sure. Yeah, we've had some great questions coming in and we're doing our best on the back end to answer a lot of them as well. We have a question from Bridget that I think is one that's often asked, can an organization versus an individual sign up for Twitter and is there a different way to do it if you're signing up an organization versus individual? Is there a way to make sure that it's – I mean is it the same setup? Yeah, it is the same setup and typically what we say, you may want to have your own personal handle there that you use more for your personal needs and then you would have an organization's handle that represents your organization just like you saw earlier with the TechSoup organization process. So the process is the same and you just decide which is your organization, which is yours and there's a lot of debate about personal versus business but we won't get into all of this right now. But yes, it is possible and even be commended. Great. And then around hashtags, Bob asked how do you create one? And I was responding letting him know you can just put a hashtag symbol before any term really but it's best to do that, learn and listen, see what other people are talking about with a given hashtag before you try to use it in case they're having a completely different, unrelevant conversation. But what if two people create the same hashtag? Nobody really owns them so how do you control that or get dominance in a given tag? Yeah, very good. Control is not typically a word talked about much in social media. There is very little control. So basically it's okay if a couple of people use the same hashtag only if you think that your use is actually consistent with the way it was used before. If it's already in use and you're considering using it, if your use is consistent with how it was used then maybe that's okay. But typically I might think it may be better to create a new one that's not in use that really represents what you're doing and how you want to do it and so on. So both strategies would work. But if your topic is unique or you're interested in creating an audience behind what you're doing and slightly different so you might consider creating a new one. Great. We're getting a lot of other questions on hashtags. So I'm going to go ahead and share out a link to a resource that I think might help people with hashtag-specific questions and then we can go ahead and move forward. And we'll have more time for Q&A later but we just want to keep moving through the different platforms so we have an opportunity to cover those main ones. Thanks so much Pierre. Thank you. So now let's talk a little bit more philosophically about this. So we did kind of the learning part and now the listening is really more about being out there absorbing what's going on and who's who. Now to listen, the first step I would recommend is exactly the step we had in the pre-work which is take a look at your audiences and what you do and your projects and your organization and come up with the top 10 professionals in your industry. So that could be whatever you want it to be. It could be the thought leaders. It could be the people who relate to your function, maybe they're experts in the type of work that you do within your organization. But people that really relate to what you do and that they have some value to add. And then people in your organization or in related organizations, authors you like, colleagues, friends, so create this list and then go ahead and follow these people. Some of them will follow you back, some may not but later they start to follow you more as they see that you're now engaged, etc. So then start to listen what topics they're talking about, what people are maybe tweeting that gives you some great ideas for more people to follow and then what value they're adding or not adding. So start to learn from them. Are they putting things that are relevant that seem to add value? Are they just chitchatting and promoting things that may not be as relevant? In which case you can unfollow them. And then also keep an eye on your brand. Maybe if you're a small organization maybe you don't have a lot out there about your brand yet but maybe your areas of interest to do some searches, see what people are doing. You can by the way, save searches and you can quickly get back to them. So then getting to experimenting and now you start to really put things out there so you're retweeting, you're replying, maybe doing more searches. And then we're talking here about maybe 15, 20 minutes twice a week so we're not talking about a major investment in efforts so maybe learning could be the first week or two and then listening a couple of weeks, experimenting a couple of weeks with you who have already been in these platforms. You don't even need that time. Maybe you can jump into the listening, adjusting your list, making sure you have the right people in it and then experimenting and move to this stage. So this stage is the one I really want to take you through and that starts with stepping back and thinking now that you're familiar with these platforms some more and you're thinking about them slightly differently, what is your purpose, your primary purpose? You need to have one specific primary purpose that can guide you and make your work in the platforms even if you spend just 15 minutes a week make it very relevant, very effective. So for instance, maybe your primary purpose is to recruit volunteers and that's what you want to accomplish in social media. So you need to know that, everyone in your organization need to know that and everyone who might help or contribute to social media may be able to help in accomplishing that purpose. What are other purposes you may have? They're not your primary purpose so you may not spend much time here but you might once in a while address them and that could be something else and then what are you not going to do there? So you're very clear on how you're going to use this platform. And maybe you create one of these for each platform or maybe it's one that just guides your overall social media effort. So primary purpose could be recruiting volunteers, it could be engaging donors, it could be staying up to date on new regulations and trends. So whatever is most important to you and think back about the applications I showed you very early on to give you more ideas and define that. And then once you define that now you're going to be doing this regularly. So maybe again like I said once or twice a week in a small organization typically what we see is that a team of people, maybe a few people, maybe four or five people, they each take on doing 15, 20 minutes once or twice a week and then you see their social media effort really become useful and relevant and in sync with everything else they're doing. So social media is just one extra channel and basically it can help complement everything else you are doing and it can serve as a great complement. Okay, so we're going to move on to Facebook. Now I noticed earlier when Becky asked that little question that Facebook seems to be the most popular today which is not a surprise and that's why we're not going to spend a lot of time on going through the whole page of Facebook and talking about people posting information and all that. I'm going to go for these concepts. So the concept of pages, talk a little bit about the concept of groups and then talk a little bit about ads. You may be surprised to see ads here because you may be thinking well we don't necessarily want to advertise but that's okay because you may or may not advertise but I think there's an aspect of this that might be helpful. So pages quickly, pages are pretty much, let me go back here. So let's find the TechSoup page. So pages, an organization page on Facebook it's like a website on the web. That's what it is. It's just organized a little bit more like a Facebook type organization where you can post things and people can like and comment and share. So it's a very easy thing to set up and a lot of organizations have pages set up. So either you can set up your own or at least you might try to like and follow maybe the top 5 to 10 pages of organizations that are related to what you're doing that you want to keep in touch with and potentially partner with or somehow engage with. So that's what you can do. So liking is the first step which will add that page to the list of pages that you like but then follow is the other one which will cause some of these posts to directly go to your own home page. So you just don't have to come here to see them. You'll see some of their news in your home page. Groups are the same way. So I'm going to show you our group. So by the way if you haven't done that yet please like and follow the TechSoup page now. So that's such an important resource for all of us and that's a great opportunity to do it. It should take you about like 10 seconds to do that. Now the other group, the group I want to show you is the group that we have with people on the go which is Accomplishing More With Less which is about productivity and people who are interested in being productive and accomplishing more but also staying not being stressful and being at ease with it. So groups are very similar to pages. They're just kind of information where we can post things, other users can post things and then interact and comment and share. So the difference between pages and groups is that pages is intended for businesses and organizations. Groups is intended for people to have common interests or cause or activity so it's slightly different conceptually but from a future perspective they are very similar. So again I would highly recommend you go find groups maybe 5 to 10 groups that are really related to your causes where your volunteers hang out where maybe your donors and other people that you're interested in hang out and join these groups. So we say join these groups, you join the group and then you can also follow the group after you join the group so you can also stay more in touch with that group. So now ads, let's talk briefly about ads. So I'm going to create an ad here and I would like this ad to send people to my website. Let's try that again. And I'm let's say providing a new service and let's say I'm an educational nonprofit and I have this new project to help people who are going to college late in life. So I want to give them all kinds of services to make sure they get the support they need and they finish their education and they enhance their lives and their family's lives, whatever your project is. So I'm going to go down here and say this is a service I'm going to provide in California and then these are people who are going to college and they are in life so they are in between their mid-30s and mid-40s and go to education and say they are in college. So look at here this number. I don't know if you noticed throughout but it kept updating pretty much the total number of people now it gave me exactly how many people I can reach based on this criteria. And now I can create this ad to, well first of all even if I don't create the ad now I have a much better understanding of my target audience and the size of the audience but now if I do create an ad to take them to my group or my page or my website where I'm doing an event or some research about them I can target exactly the audience I need. Let's do one more thing. Let's say I'm interested really in San Francisco so then it tells me there are about 1,000 people who qualify in San Francisco and now I can target these people. So that's what I wanted to share with you that you may or may not do something like this but just know it's a good research place if you decide to even just research and it could be an interesting way to actually reach certain specific groups. Linked in, pages and groups are very similar so I would highly recommend you go follow the pages of maybe corporate pages of people who are of companies who support you and your causes it would be great to stay in touch with them that way. And also nonprofits, also groups that relate to your causes and your issues so be kind of in the middle of that conversation. And then search is the one that I'm going to spend just like a minute or two showing you some capabilities that we don't normally think about when it comes to search but that they are very important in helping you find the right people. Linked in is another resource that we see way underutilized. It's basically it has so much information that's so rich and so interesting that we see typically a lot of audiences use it at a very superficial level. So you may want to consider checking it again and using it as a way to connect with all these audiences I mentioned earlier. Okay, so the advanced search. So with the advanced search let's say I'm doing this project and I need maybe people from the healthcare to help me figure out how to optimize this project, maybe enlist them as advisory board members or board members or something to get their help into this interesting healthcare related project. So I might do this. I might search for and I want them to be influenced in their companies because I'd like also to get them to connect me with other people in their organizations or whatever else. I'm going to search for vice presidents and in this case I want this to be local because I'm serving a local audience. And the industry, I think I passed it here, so hospital and healthcare. And let's see what we have here. So I got 1700 people. And that's a good start but that's too many. I'm a small organization. I don't have time to reach 1700 people. So how can I narrow this down a little bit in a way that's meaningful? There are many ways to narrow it down. I might narrow it down by school. I want to find the people who went to the same school where I did so that it's more likely that I can get in touch with them, get some more positive response and then build a relationship and hopefully invite them to participate in this activity. So now I got 31 people. So this is probably one of the most effective results that I can get because these people I have something in common with them. They fit exactly the demographics that I'm looking for and they're likely to be my champions even if I get five or six of them to join me in this effort. That's a huge win. So now I can connect with them here or I can go back to the Stanford directory, connect them with them there. I can even send them an e-mail. So for those of you who are dealing with funders and you're looking for funders all the time, e-mail and upgrading your subscription and LinkedIn to the next level so you can send e-mail can be a great tool and a great way to reach more people. So that's what I wanted to give you about search is basically see if you can enhance the way you use LinkedIn and really get to those people that are relevant and get much more accomplished. Okay, my final comments and I included some tips here. And as Becky mentioned earlier at the end of the presentation you'll see many more slides that can help you take a look at some more topics, maybe give you some ideas for things you could research and get into. But for now I'd like to get to blogs and just mention a couple more things about blogs before I hand it back to Becky. And that is blogs believe it or not are by far the most important platform because that's where the real content resides. So everything else is telling you yes I'm here, I'm there, etc. But they all typically point back to an article to a real article where the real knowledge resides and these are typically the blogs. So find the three to five blogs that are relevant to you and actually sorry this is China tier is a typo from some other slides that are relevant to you and consider subscribing to them. They used to be block search. This is no longer inexistent by the way. Social media is changing all the time. So when I was updating the slides I noticed that we still have block search there. But you don't need block search just go google.com and search author topic and you'll find people's blogs. So that's my last kind of thought on blogs. Now I included this action plan for you in the slides so you can use it as a sample and after the session today create some action plan for you. Make it easy, make it something you can do by 15 minutes twice a week or so. And you can make that either if you've already been in these platforms. You already have done a lot. You know a lot of this already. Make it as a way to re-strategize and rethink how you can be very relevant with the right audience, with the right goal. If you're new to social media this is your chance to kind of get in it slowly and get to listen so you spend more time listening and getting to know how you can leverage it and then hopefully after this week, after this month you can do this again and next time it's going to look very, very different. So last thing, this is the workshop that we provide to you. So this is our donation to TechSoup. Feel free to join us. Hopefully you'll get a chance to do that. And then feel free to connect with me and connect with our groups. These are my books if you want to check them out. I'm looking forward to answering some questions and I'm going to hand it back to Becky now. Becky, thank you so much for that Pierre. This is really interesting stuff. And we've had a lot of activity and questions on the back end. I'm going to go ahead and click to stop sharing from your desktop and bounce us back to the slide deck. And like I mentioned earlier on, there are some additional slides in here. We're not going to go over them all right now but some of them get into more advanced techniques and other tools. Somebody was asking about aggregators. And he's got great tips in some of these slides that are going to be in the deck that you get that we don't have time to go through all of this today. We knew that coming in but he wanted to include them as great resources for you as well with etiquette and best practices. He mentioned some tools that you can use. So we had a question from Walter about aggregators and Hootsuite is one of those that can help you manage your different social media channels and streams so that you can pre-schedule things. We did have a couple of questions come in from Twitter. One of them was asking how often do you recommend posting to Twitter and Facebook? And does that differ for the different social channels? Like do you have to post every day? Do you post seven times a day? Do you post once a week? What do you think is the magic number if there is one? So this is a great question and it's the dilemma we all have, like how much and what. So the way typically I answer this question is it really depends on your audience. If you're after volunteers and you know that they're on 24 by 7 and they're very engaged and they're always on, you may want to have more frequency and different times and every day. If you're after donors who may be on once a week or twice a week and notice actually their frequency. So as you do your listening notice where your audience is and the main philosophy I promote is try to match your audience. So if your audience is there once or twice a week you see a few updates with them every week but that's it and they're very focused and they don't spend a lot of time in the platforms. You just go in to check on a few things and then match that with them. But if they're very active etc. then you can match that. So there is no golden rule. Some people come up with some rules. I would say if I were to give you just like a backup plan I would say at least for a small organization who doesn't have a dedicated person on social media it would be nice to see at least twice a week in different platforms and maybe in Twitter maybe three to five times a week something. So that's kind of like to stay very rough saying if you need something like this. I think that's great advice especially for a bare minimum if you've got, you know, just you're carving out just a few minutes of your own time and you wear many other different hats in your organization. But if you're doing something a couple of times a week I think that's a great place to start. We had a lot of other questions. We have a bunch of people who said some of their board or their staff or their leadership think that social media is just for being social and not as a personal platform and not so much for work or they don't really see the value in it other than just pushing stuff out. So maybe they'll post something and push it out there and they don't really interact. How do you recommend helping organizations or individuals in an organization bridge that gap in helping other people who might be advocating for their organization to be more social, to interact more and to see the value in it in the first place? So one thing that comes to my mind is to do a little research on your stakeholders, the stakeholders of your organization and typically these are the categories I've been mentioning throughout the session today like your donors, your beneficiaries, your volunteers, your partners, etc. So doing a little research, maybe even it could be a survey, it could be interviewing some of them, it could be a combination, ideally a combination. I think surveys are great but then having a few conversations with a few key people that can be great and ask them, are you on social media? What do you do there? And how often? How can we get your attention there? Do you think we should be doing this and how and what? So that could be the data that can help you step back and use it in your argument why social media needs some attention. Now that could be one part of the data, the other part of the data is look into some subject matter experts like people who help with funding, who have a lot of experience in helping nonprofits get funding and see what they're doing on social media and then what they recommend and what they're doing. So I think it's collecting the data but starting with your stakeholders and then going back maybe with even a little plan, you see that table we talked about earlier that let me see if I can quickly get to it. So this one, actually I don't have the screen now anymore. That's okay. The table that has in it the main purpose, defining the purpose, the secondary purpose, etc. So go back with all of this information and that table and then maybe also some more elaboration what you hope to get from it, the four-week plan, etc. So I think data is very powerful. Talking to stakeholders is very powerful and having a more focused vision on what you want to accomplish in social media that can all be powerful and making a case for it. That's great. And I'm sorry I wasn't able to pull up the table quickly. I think I clicked on the wrong things but we have a bunch of other questions in here as well. So let me go ahead with a couple more. Some specific questions around how do you get people to follow you? Either on Twitter or how do you get them to like your page? What's the best advice you have for getting people just to pay attention to that you're even there? So the first thing it starts, so let me talk first at a very high level and then I'll bring it to some more practical things. At a high level it's that word of the day. It's relevant. The more you put things that are relevant, the more you connect with people that are relevant, the more likely you get people to follow you back. By the way, it's not important to have a lot of followers. It's more important to have relevant followers. So relevant can be the thing. And by the way, we want to also, this is a side note, if you've been counting my relevant, this is the last one so I won't count anymore. We're done. Please send that in the chat panel to Becky and the team and then after the fact Becky will take a look at them and we'll send the actual prizes. But just for now back to the question. So yeah, then the next thing comes putting some thought into promoting your social media presence and that starts with having it everywhere in your signature, in your brochures, on your website, everywhere. So on your business cards, when you meet with people, first thing you may want to do, and this is where the mobile apps become so essential so having the LinkedIn mobile app right there so you can connect with them right then. Not later. They may not remember you. So right then. And having the Twitter and connect with them on Twitter right then and they're likely to follow you if you do it right then and whatever else. So basically do it on the spot when you meet people in networking events, etc. If you present and you have an opportunity to speak on behalf of your organization or when your other members of your organization are speaking, make sure at the top of the presentation you have that information. Follow us here. Follow us there. Make sure your presenter will include in their presentation a little note to ask everybody to follow everybody. So all these tactics will help but that relevant information connecting with that relevant people, putting information that people will find valuable is the key. People will start to follow you when you do that. Very helpful. So we have to go ahead and wrap things up. We know there's more questions in the queue and we'll try to see if there's a way to gather ones that are similar and maybe put that in a blog post and follow up with a link to that at a later point. But you can also continue the discussion in TechSoup's community forums. We have a digital engagement forum where we have experts talking about social media best practices who can help you answer specific questions. So feel free to post there. And I'd love it if aside from chatting in the number of times you heard that magic word in today's webinar, if you can chat in one thing that you learned or will try to implement, maybe it will be going to Twitter and creating that account and following people. Maybe it will be setting up your Facebook page or maybe it will be following some of those influential leaders and colleague organizations that you haven't spent time doing and following some other folks back after they've heard you. So check out the different tips that Pierre shared and let us know what thing stood out to you, what you learned, how you'll try to implement them to help your organization. And please take time to share this with other organizations you think could help learn from it as well. I wanted to quickly just share. We have a bunch of resources in the slide deck that I mentioned. We didn't get to go through all of that. But we've got resources across TechSoup's site, how to create social media policies, using social media for events, fundraising with social media, specific events on different platforms like Tumblr. So check out some of the things that are here. I also linked to some leaders in the nonprofit community who write a lot about social media and do a lot of work on this topic. And these are good places to check out, to get more information and to move forward with your own social media planning and strategy. I also want to just mention before we completely wrap up here that we have other webinars coming up. For those of you who aren't as familiar with TechSoup and our donation programs, you can learn how to get started or refresh yourself if you haven't requested donations in a long time. This is a good time to come and learn about that, and I will be leading it based on the topics you most want to cover next Thursday. And then we'll have Tech Planning Tips for Smaller Libraries. And I also wanted to just mention that we are going to have a contest that is coming up starting next week and for the next couple of months where we will be sharing stories for those who use Adobe Creative Cloud. And if you share your stories, there are opportunities to win all kinds of prizes about how you use Adobe and Creative Cloud products. So watch for that. And we are going to use the hashtag Celebrate Adobe CC. So keep an eye out for that coming soon. Join us to check out our other webinars. And you can also connect with us at TechSoup Global, TechSoup.org, and on our Facebook and Twitter. Many of you already did today and I'll make sure to follow and retweet and share the content but even tweeting out and sharing on Twitter along with us for this webinar. So thank you all for doing that. Thank you so much Pierre. Really appreciate you joining us and sharing some expertise and that it's not so scary to get started. And if you are already there, it's not so scary to just continue moving a little bit forward each week to better expand your organization's reach and impact in these social channels. Go where the people are, right? So lastly I'd like to thank ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor. They provide the use of this platform for us to present these webinars. And they are also a donor in our product catalogs. If you are interested in presenting events and online meetings you can learn more about them at TechSoup.org slash ReadyTalk. When you exit out of this webinar go ahead and complete that post-event survey to let us know how we can continue to improve our webinar programming. We really appreciate your time today and hope you will join us again soon. Thanks so much everyone. Have a great day. Bye-bye.