A social media toolkit – such as a website or an email campaign – is the new way to communicate with your customers. A social media toolkit helps create an interactive and memorable experience that optimizes results.
We’ve put together a collection of tools and the step-by-step instructions for how to create your own Social Media Toolkit, available for download and 100% Free.
Purpose
A social media toolkit contains information and resources to push out and amplify a social media campaign/cause. It is similar to a press kit for promoting a news item, but the audience is your supporters and partners, rather than journalists or media contacts.
The toolkit at heart is a messaging exercise: when creating content for your social media toolkit, think about the values and interests of your audiences (who you want to take action), and how to strategically use text, visuals and interact elements to capture their attention.
You will share your toolkit with your supporters, advocates, colleagues and partner organizations who have agreed to help amplify your campaign/cause.
Elements of a Social Media Toolkit
Purpose
Start the toolkit with an overview and how it is designed to be used. Consider the following questions:
– What is the campaign/cause?
– Why is this campaign/cause important to your supporters and your shared goals?
– Are there links to news articles or related organizations to contextualize the campaign/cause?
– What do you want your supporters to do? What are instructions and best practices for supporters to engage with and use the toolkit?
– Who should people contact for more information or questions about the campaign/cause or toolkit?
Sample Posts
Include 4-5 sample social media posts for each platform you want to roll out the campaign/cause on (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Supporters can copy and paste posts, or write their own using the same messaging, link, and hashtags. The version of each post should fit the length and tone of the different platforms. For example:
– Twitter posts should be no longer than 280 characters
– Twitter and Facebook posts should almost always be accompanied with a visual, either as a link preview or an uploaded visual asset
– Instagram posts use square images
– Instagram posts can include up to 30 hashtags, but we recommend up to 5 strong and specific hashtags
Hashtags
Recommend 4-6 hashtags for your supporters to use when sharing your campaign/cause on social media. Search for hashtags on your selected social media platforms and select ones that are used to highlight similar issues.
If this is a large campaign, consider creating a new hashtag. Hashtags unify posts and make it easy for followers to quickly find all information about your campaign (as long as your hashtag is consistently used).
Visual Assets
The shareability and virality of social media posts is highly dependent on the use of compelling visuals that carry an emotional impact. Include a set of visual assets to accompany social media posts on all platforms, such as branded visuals or agreed-upon photos that represent the campaign.
If your organization doesn’t have access to a professional designer to create branded visuals, don’t worry. We recommend using Canva, a free browser-based visuals design tool. You don’t need any graphic design experience, it uses an intuitive drag-and-drop feature, and you get access to hundreds of customizable templates for each social media.
Keep in mind that visuals should be sized according to the requirements of each platform. Refer to this updated spreadsheet by SproutSocial for image size guidelines.
When uploading visuals to social media, be sure to include alternate text to make the content accessible to low and no vision users using text-only browsers. When uploading videos, make sure they include open or closed captioning for deaf or hard of hearing users.
Social Media Metrics
When rolling out any social media campaign/cause, use metrics to watch to determine effectiveness of your team’s efforts. Track metrics in the analytics page of each social media platform on a consistent basis and use that information to adjust your strategy accordingly. Are some images getting more engagement and performing much better than others? Increase your usage of those and table the rest. Is no one clicking on your call to action link? Make sure the link actually works and is entered in correctly in the post. Are your posts not getting the attention of key influencers and decisionmakers? Include their handles in posts going forward and engage with their posts to draw more attention to your content.
Some metrics you may consider tracking, post-campaign launch:
- Number of donations
- Website page visits
- Number of email addresses captured
- Likes/reshares/retweets/comments/follows on social media
Enhance social giving initiatives with a social media toolkit
What is a social media toolkit?
A social media toolkit contains resources that you can use to streamline your social giving campaigns on social media platforms. It’s similar to a media kit, but instead of elements for reporters like press releases and press mentions, it contains information for social media marketing.
What goes inside a social media toolkit?
A good toolkit should contain a checklist of five essential elements:
- A video about your campaign or donation drive
- Stories and data
- A few good hashtags
- Attention-grabbing photos
- Written content
These elements will help you maximize a donation campaign, increase event registration, or anything else that pushes your social sharing initiatives forward. Let’s look at how each asset can be used.
- 85% of organizations found Facebook video marketing to be successful and effective.
- 88% said the same for Instagram videos.
- 71% said the same for videos on Twitter.
- Create branded logos, banners, and profile pictures for your social media accounts.
- Compile campaign data into easy-to-read infographics.
- Take various photos for each campaign that help generate awareness.
Social Media Toolkits to Help Your Business Grow
Click’s Social Media Toolkit
Who the toolkit is for
This toolkit is for B2B social media marketers. It can be used by any business but is best suited to small-to-medium-sized businesses. However, as one of the better toolkits out there, anyone could benefit from dipping into it to see how they structure their social work.
Key features of the toolkit
The Click social media toolkit has a huge range of tools to make it easier for you to put your social media marketing strategy into practice.
Compared to other available toolkits, it’s pretty comprehensive.
The resource ‘Social Media Advertising – What are the Options?’ explains the best options for paid advertising across the main social platforms. These help you spend wisely and get the most for your money.
The toolkit includes a checklist to prepare your social accounts, and a social media cheat sheet to help make those key shortcuts where you could be saving time.
There is also a free customizable social media content planner. You can download your own, then adapt it to suit your social media objectives.
Where to start with the toolkit
Once you’ve downloaded the social media toolkit, we recommend you take a look at the “Pros and Cons of Social Media” infographic.
This helps you understand which channels will work best for your business. It then makes sense to move on to the Cheat Sheet, which gives an understanding of how you can make social work for your business – the easy way.
SEMRush Social Media Toolkit
Who the toolkit is for
This toolkit is for B2B social media marketers. Although B2C marketers won’t find everything relevant, they will find some useful tips and tricks they can apply to their own practice.
Key features of the toolkit
The SEMRush Social Media Toolkit describes itself as having only two ‘tools’: the Social Media Poster as well as the Social Media Tracker.
However, this doesn’t do justice to the range of resources available within the Poster and Planner. They’re both comprehensive and can help you make your own social plan or social media planning tools.
Where to start with the toolkit
It makes sense to start by reading about why the Poster and the Tracker are the central tools of the toolkit. From there, you can launch your own project, and begin using the tools for yourself.
The Open University Social Media Toolkit
Who the toolkit is for
This toolkit is designed for staff of UK virtual learning platform The Open University, who use social media both professionally and personally.
It’s a simple, effective toolkit for a large organization, so if you’re looking for something similar for your own, take notes.
Key features of the toolkit
The social media toolkit contains detailed guidelines for your company’s social medai use. You can see that there are three different sets of guidelines for each department of the Open University:
The toolkit also has some stellar advice on creating video and audio for social media:
Where to start with the toolkit
Take a look at the Guidance by Social Network page to get a good feel for where to start. This section breaks down its advice by social channel.
From setting up the channels through to posting content, there’s everything an employee needs to know about posting. If you’re new to using and planning social media, this is exactly the footing you need.
Smart Insights Social Media Toolkit
Who the toolkit is for
This toolkit is for both B2B & B2C social media marketers.
Key features of the toolkit
Digital marketing community Smart Insights has designed a social media toolkit that draws on multiple resources from across the web – a bit like this article!
This makes it a great resource for understanding everything that goes into creating a great social media toolkit.
For example, the toolkit points you in the direction of using analytics natively within each social platform, such as Twitter analytics below.
For planning, Smart Insights points you to influencer marketing platform Buzzsumo, as well as other social media and content platforms. This allows you to do the research on which platform is best suited to your organization’s needs.
Where to start with the toolkit
This toolkit is somewhat limited because it primarily links out to other resources. So there’s no real clues here about how to bring your own toolkit together, however, there is a heck of a lot of resources that are going to help you get there.
Conclusion
Learn how to create a social media toolkit by downloading our guide. This social media toolkit will help you create a marketing plan and organize your business around Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.