Social Media marketing drives club interest

I've been experimenting with social media marketing to help drive interest in Toastmasters. I've had the most luck with Google Plus and FourSquare.

If you are unfamiliar with check-in services the activity is you post what you are doing and where you are doing it. These services share your postings primarily by connecting you geographically with others. You can choose to post publicly or just share with friends. In my case it is exceptionally rare I ever post anything private. This way its easy to keep track of settings and I don't care when these services change their privacy settings.

So here is what I do. At the beginning of each meeting a normally take a photo and post it along with a comment. I ensure my location is clearly marked so location-based social media indexes it correctly. Only people geographically near me would be interested in my post. This is one reason I do not bother with Facebook as their location indexing is a bit sloppy... at least right now.

My comments sometimes include the word 'Toastmasters' and other times are personal improvement oriented goals such as 'improving my verbal communication skills'. I mix it up so it is not too repetitious.

I often get several thumbs-up/like type votes. However, when someone takes the time to comment on my posting I make a point to write a quick note back. Typical response is to give them our club website and let them know our next meeting date. Then 2-3 days before that meeting I return to the original post and add a reminder comment. At all times I make a point not to be pushy whatsoever and keep it very light.

Here are some screenshots of my activity. By far I've had the most connections with Google Plus.

What has your experience been? Any comments/suggestions?

This is great. Hopefully, we will see support for Google+ and Foursquare (links and logos displayed for club and members) in a future FTH 2 update.

Obviously, we can add links on a custom web page, but the integrated social media hooks in FTH 2.0 are a nice addition.

Regards,

Steve James, VPE/Webmaster, Club 1966 Mindful Communicators

We focus on using Facebook because of the raw number of prospects. I have managed to get AddThis plugin to work on our site. The trick is to put the code in the using the Source editor and save before switching back to the visual editor. The Visual Editor will scrub out the code.

Can you please provide a little more information on the AddThis plugin?

Thanks!

AddThis is a little bit of java script code that puts social media links in your articles. You can use it with or without setting up a free account at www.addthis.com . If you have the account it will record statistics.

If you have seen sites where it prompts to to "share" or "like" a page using a small button, that's what this does. The trouble is that the 2.o Editor does not like the AddThis code and removes it in the visual editor. You have to use the Source editor to install it.

There are two ways to do it. The easy way is to copy the code from AddThis and put the it right into the page. This is fine if you are only going to have one set of buttons on a page. You have to use the "Source" Editor to do this.

If you plan on having more than one set of buttons on a page, then you should place the java script in the tag which can easily be done by adding the code to the end of the "Google Analytics Script Code" verification on the Site Administration panel of the Admin Console. Then you have another shorter code to place in your "Source" editor.

When using both of these methods you have to save and close while in the "Source" editor. The visual editor will automatically remove the code. So you have to re-do this every time you edit a page.

Wow, that works beautifully. Thanks for the heads up!
Anthony