Social Media for Community Centres - Part 1

We are but a few months away from the end of an extremely active and prolific year for the Networking 2.0 project! We have already trained hundreds of employment counsellors and almost as many job seekers. However, we still have many centres to go before all job seekers in the Montreal area have equal access to the necessary resources in order to learn how to use social media in a professional setting. Therefore, I will make a shameless plug and advise you take part in one of our free seminars if you haven’t already done so. You already know how to contact us.

 However, if you’ve already followed one of our Networking 2.0 trainings, whether in your centre or elsewhere, you will have heard us explain and demonstrate the many uses of social media for job seekers. Since our public is observant, in almost every centre we visited we were asked whether the organization should add their own social media accounts to their arsenal. The answer was almost invariably the same:

“We encourage you to create a social media presence for your organization. However, our training is primarily concerned with services and competencies that are to be transmitted to immigrant job seekers first and foremost. That being said, there are many online resources pertaining to corporate use of social media, including NGOs.”

 We will now outline the reasons why we believe your participants, personnel and organization can benefit enormously from a social media presence.

 Part One

Why You Should Consider Organizational Use Of Social Media 

We have outlined eight reasons for you to be active on social media:

1) Tools at an affordable cost.

 Social media can implement quickly and for free what would require a lot more resources if one were to go about it by other means. Notably, one can use it for event planning, communications, file sharing, public relations, marketing, heightened visibility for the organization, etc.

 2) User rewards.

 By utilizing social media to reach your community in terms of job offers or upcoming events, you are providing an important, free resource to your participants as well as the community at large, thus giving them yet another reason to join the social media wave. Subsequently, you would be able to offer continuing support to their development in class as well as on the network through this new communication channel.

 3) Two birds, one stone.

 If centre personnel has come into awareness or is already active on social media, either to show your participants how to utilize them professionally (i.e. our training program) or to create an organizational account (as shown in our blog posts), you will have already invested the necessary time and effort into learning social media and are but a few steps away from tapping into its many other benefits. Teaching your participants how to use them and putting them to use for your organization are two applications for the same skill which go hand-in-hand.

4) Effective integration.

 The degree of interaction one can attain through social media in our day is impossible to replicate without using these tools. You can easily trade information and strategies with other community centres or round tables, better redirect the populace towards the services they need most and will witness the arrival of people who discovered your centre via social media. Additionally, you will be able to gather feedback pertaining to the strengths or weaknesses of your services.

5) Recruit collaborators.

 Many other community centres, social movements, independent publications, even employers are on social media. These organizations are potential collaborators you would increase your visibility to, who you would also be able to better get acquainted with by this intermediary. Take advantage of this space to express the convictions of your organization. This could potentially lead to interesting collaborative efforts.

 6) Be where they are looking for you.

 People on social media love, with good reason, those free resources that empower its users, as well as unbridled access to information. They are seeking out services and job prospects on social media. They expect friends and contacts to refer the centres they had a positive experience with. If you are being looked up on social media but cannot be found, you are missing out on the occasion to serve a clientele that wants to use your services but cannot find you, therefore they cannot recommend you to their network.

7) Develop customer loyalty.

 If you are present and active on social media, people will not require a membership to your centre or your website to make use of your services. You are ensuring their access to information, a direct means of communication and follow-up with users. By developing customer loyalty through social media tools, you can make it so they continue using your resources after they’ve left your centre and have them speak of you to potential clientele.

 8) Render teamwork more efficient.

 Accelerate information sharing at the heart of your team, make evident the benefits of project collaboration, simplify group communication and reduce internal email by up to 50%! (Source, a StopThinkSocial PowerPoint presentation).

Click here for Part Two.