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As reviewed in our marketing webinar “Promoting your brand within a shared collective”, cross-pollinating through overlap with Fibershed, the Northern California Fibershed Coop, and the Marketplace social media feeds will help drive traffic to all collective sites, including the Marketplace. This ultimately can lead to expanded exposure, increased consumer education, and ideally additional customer engagement, activity and/or sales for all. Thus we ask that you actively promote both your own work and the collective’s work by engaging with their social media norms. Be aware of how to maximize each individual business or organization’s efforts by linking up via shared content, tags, mentions, and hashtags — all described below.

Following are some general good practices for social media that are informed by and incorporated into your larger communications strategy and marketing plan can help keep you from feeling as though you’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of extra work. As you plan your larger marketing initiatives, dedicating significant time and energy for social media will help you leverage and promote the good work you are already doing.

Note: This primer assumes a basic understanding of social media and how to use its features. If you feel you need a more elementary training, please be in touch so that we can consider developing further resources suitable to the skill level of the group.

Vital Details: Feeds, URLs, Hashtags, etc.

Fibershed

Website: fibershed.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/fibershed/ (also can be tagged by typing @fibershed)

Instagram: @fibershed_

Twitter: @fibershed

Commonly Used Hashtags: #fibershed #knowyourfarmer #whogrewmyclothes #soiltosoil #climatebeneficial #localwool #regenerativeagriculture #growyourclothes #fashionrevolution #cagrown #carbonfarming #naturaldyes #localcolor #plantpalette #madeinusa #slowfashion #slowfashionmovement #sustainablefashion #ecofashion #consciousconsumer #fieldtofashion #climatebeneficialwool #climatebeneficialtransitional #changeclimatechange #circularfashion

Influencers followed/commonly tagged: We always tag the photographer and the relevant parties (farmer, designer, brand, model, mill, etc.)

Cooperative Member Training: Marketing Tool

Social Media Primer

October 2018

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Northern California Fibershed Cooperative

Website: norcalfibershedcoop.com

Instagram: @norcalfibershedcoop

Facebook: TBD in future

Twitter: TBD in future

Commonly Used Hashtags: #sheep365, #rawfleece, #shearingtime, #fibershed, #notions, #sewing, #climatebeneficialwool, #naturaldye, #naturaldyes, #fibershedmarketplace, #coops, #mutualbenefit,#joinourflock, #bestfiberfriends, #soils, #pollinators, #transhumance, #transhumancefestival, #wool, #soilhealth, #soilcarbon, #community, #slowfashion, #localclothes, #localeconomy, #growyourclothes, #regenerativeagriculture

Influencers followed/commonly tagged: @lanislanawool, @meridianjacobs, @gynnamade, @4livingcolors, @twirlyarn, @fibershed_, @norcalfibertales, @stargrazers, @lambtownfestival, @francoise_leclerc, @fringeassociation, @avfkw, @hustontextilecompany, @mendowool, @2nfrom, @bradford.debby, @maclean.erin, @rebeccaburgess, @stonestepfarm, @wildoathollow, @quatzical, @figsrag, @littleboots7, @zekaworld

Fibershed Marketplace

Website: fibershedmarketplace.com

Instagram: @fibershedmarketplace

Facebook: TBD in future

Twitter: TBD in future

Commonly Used Hashtags: same as Coop, see above

Influencers followed/commonly tagged: same as Coop, see above

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General Protocol & Good Practice

n Add value and make connections. Provide relevant, worthwhile information and perspectives. If you see interesting content from other organizations, link to it, comment on it, and promote it.

n Follow the same conduct standards you would in personal interactions. Be professional, show respect and courtesy to all, and be a good ambassador for your business.

n Recognize that some information might be sensitive or confidential. As a saying goes, “Think of CNN, your mother, and your boss” – if you wouldn’t say it to a reporter or at a conference, consider whether you should post it online.

n Do not discuss non-public information about your business or other stakeholders without their permission. Be sure to follow agreed-upon timelines for promotional publicity such as a project or product launch; check in with and follow the lead of the organizer/lead business where applicable.

n Be considerate when discussing the activities of an industry, its organizations, or colleague companies, especially when you are an active member of said industry. Be an ambassador not only for your business, but for the collective sector.

n Do not endorse or disparage any particular products, entities, political candidates, or legislation by recommending a specific action (voting for or against something or someone, buying or boycotting a particular product or company). This approach can be slightly tempered if your brand identity is entirely linked to your personal identity, but we still suggest leaving politics out of your business marketing matters.

n Make sure any facts are well researched, accurate, and correctly cited. Include sources, where appropriate.

n Respect copyrights and trademarks. Make sure you have permission to post any copyrighted or confidential information.

n Always credit images with photographer.

n If you include an inaccurate or misleading statement on a social media platform, correct the mistake and acknowledge the correction.

n Use good judgment when using social media for personal use.

n Quality over quantity (and over spontaneity): Share the highest quality content and best visuals that you have, tapping into any existing professional photography albums and taking tips from Paige Green’s lighting tutorials for Marketplace product shots.

Voice & ToneYour Creative Brief will help you further define your “voice” for your brand identity as well as within social media. Keep a generally courteous demeanor and try to avoid being overly critical or opinionated.

As entrepreneurs and members of a growing industry, you can afford a tone that is fresh, fun and engaging, and instructional without being “preachy”. Keep it real but also inviting. Don’t get too cute with obtuse, tongue-in-cheek hashtags.

Consistency in your own social media feedsUsing your learnings in Communications Strategy and Creative Brief, repeat your general aesthetic, voice and feeling of your business (ie., your brand identity!) throughout your feeds. People should be able to see a similarity between your profiles of all your social media feeds and posts, and a general consistency of content.

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This doesn’t mean content has to be the same, but rather complementary and always reflective of your overarching brand identity.

Example: Click the links to investigate the look, feel, content and overlaps of Alabama Chanin’s various social media feeds: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, School of Making Stichalong Facebook Group.

Community BuildingKeep a list of your colleagues, friends, business associates and partners, customers, media, fellow producers, artisans, supply chain vendors, etc. who you love/admire/envy and follow them on social media. You can mine the collective’s feeds (Fibershed, Coop, Marketplace, and colleague sellers) to find new inspirations of who to follow. When you are unprepared or too busy to share your own content, you can share their news via reposts and retweets. They are a good source of news and events that are relevant to your work and by sharing, you are supporting your image as an informed industry leader. Spend as much time engaging with other social media users as you do marketing your own work.

Turn your contacts into promoters! Often, your biggest brand ambassadors start off as strangers, visitors or new customers. Providing engaging content, social media incentives, top-tier customer service and meaningful information will help you to transform those strangers into promoters. Identify your strongest supporters and continue to nurture and engage with them as you would a new customer.

Shared Language for the Collective

TagsWhen your work involves others, or you are participating in a group setting, tag your colleagues’ social media feeds to drive more overall traffic to everyone’s social media efforts. We encourage you to constantly tag those in the collective (Fibershed/Coop/Marketplace/colleague sellers) when relevant to your content. This includes organizations as well as fellow producers or collaborators of any kind, outside of the collective. The more people or businesses tagged in your posts, the more exposure your post will have. They may also repost your content if they feel it is relevant to their work, again creating multiple levels and opportunities for content to reach users.

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LocationsBe sure to tag location of where you are when relevant to content. For example, if you are posting about a special event, be sure to add location tag to your post so people have that extra piece of geographical information about the event, setting, region that your work happens in. This goes for on-farm or in-store posts as well: be sure to ground where you are for users via location tags.

HashtagsUsing those listed in vital details above, reinforce the viral spread of concepts and ideas by using hashtags to help guide traffic to your social media feed. By using the same hashtags as the collective, you have a better chance of showing up for consumers and the public in their social media “radar”, and thus inviting them in to your work and offerings via social media.

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Take it one step further: by following the commonly used hashtags of all entities, you can stay up to date with the digital conversation around these themes, and find content in other feeds that you can use to beef up your own by reposting others’ content.

Concepts/IdeasSome ideas for shared content that you can post about are below. When used together with tags, locations, and hashtags, you are optimizing the social media overlap potential with the collective, and thus creating the best chance of gaining exposure to your work via theirs.

n Farm/store activity snapshots

n Upcoming event dates, markets, conferences, gatherings

n Live shots while participating in above activities

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n Dedicated product or animal news

n Specific product feature with direct push to Marketplace and direct link to item page in bio

n Day-to-day challenges or successes

n Online or in-person shopping opportunities for your customers via your own activities or your resellers’ activities

n Hopeful or existing retail vendors’ activities, events, promotions. Ex: small boutique shop that carries your yarn.

n Hopeful or existing wholesale or supply chain vendors’ activities, events, promotions. Ex: restaurant that carries your lamb; mill that processes your wool

n Articles and socially-minded news within your field and/or interests

n Regional and county craft and agriculture news

n Seasonal; holiday greetings

n Coop and/or Marketplace news, features, changes, general community love. Remember, promoting the diversity of products on the marketplace (and not just your own products) can help drive sales just as much if not more than just your own product posts.

n Fibershed news, research, initiatives, releases, events, activities you have participated in or are about to participate in. Post even if you are not participating these initiatives to drum up general promotion for the organization’s activities and cross-promote.

n Ask your community what they want to hear or see: Q&A or “ask me anything” are very popular at the moment on Instagram — there is even an Instagram Stories tool that encourages followers to write in questions or comments, or you could pose this in a caption — this can be specific to your skills, practice, products, or services

n Consider posting “flashback” or “throwback” content linking to previous Fibershed or community content like a blog post, report, Symposium talk, or fashion show photo, to share more about how and when you got involved and how your role & participation in the community has evolved. (Don’t be self conscious -- remember that most followers, and especially new followers, are not keeping up with your full story. Your post is amongst a sea of content and it’s often welcome to remind people why you do what you do, how you got here, what aspects of Fibershed/Coop/Marketplace speak to you or drew you in, etc.)

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Timing & Scheduling

We suggest creating a calendar of content so as to organize your posts rather than needing to create them on a whim, in the middle of your “actual work” etc. This allows you to focus on social media during administrative moments rather than feel like it is something you constantly need to be working on (and thus potentially neglecting).

You can maintain two types of content calendars:

1) a larger roadmap for important events throughout the year that you already have planned, and

2) a weekly calendar that gives structure to your daily interactions.

Keep a schedule of posts based on the following considerations:

1. Equal play to products & services you sell (enterprises)

2. The latest news, events, happenings — ideally also sent out via an email newsletter (see below)

3. Compelling visual or video content on your own operations

4. Compelling visual or video content of colleagues and other industry players

5. Important industry news or industry events

TimingAccording to Fast Company, the best times for social media are:

n Facebook: Any day between 1 - 4pm. Weekend mornings seem to do very well on the Fibershed page

n Twitter: Mondays - Thursdays between 1 - 3pm

n Instagram: The most successful times on average: 2 - 5pm

n Pinterest: Saturday Mornings and Friday @ 3pm

n Tumblr: Fridays between 7pm and overnight

The best times to post depend heavily on your audience. We recommend taking some time to look back through your posts and determine which times seem to be generating the most engagement. Instagram, Twitter and Facebook all provide reporting tools that can help you evaluate engagement with your posts.

Much more information is available online about best times for social media posts. Here are some articles regarding best times of day to post: QuickSprout, The Huffington Post, Buffer, TrackMaven, Fast Company, and KISSmetrics.

Some facts:n Facebook: Photos generate 53% more likes and 104% more comments; Video posts average 62% more

engagement than photos

n Twitter: Tweets with images result in 41% increase in retweets and 48% increase in favorites

n Tumblr: Users spend 1.5 minutes longer on Tumblr per visit than on Facebook

n Instagram: Users spend an average of 21 minutes a day on Instagram

Shake up your content and timing patterns. For example, Monday morning can be for sharing industry news; Monday afternoon can simply be sharing a photo; Fridays are good days for posting weekend market or event information, and so on.

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Email Marketing, Applications & Cross-Promotion

With all of this in mind, do not underestimate the power of e-newsletters, emails blasts and rss feeds. “Conversion” refers to when a social media or online user converts into a paying customer. Here are some facts:

n Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion, and email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers. –McKinsey & Company

n Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. –Gigaom Research

n You have just 3-4 seconds to grab your reader’s attention and interest them enough to open and read your email. –Litmus

We highly recommend initiating an email offering if you don’t already do so. Try using a effective call-to-action button directing people to your specific Marketplace catalogue page at the very top of your email newsletters to help increase conversion. If you don’t have an email provider look into MailChimp for your e-newsletter and email blasts.

Blogging is also an extremely successful way to continue to drive traffic in between your site, your social media, and the Marketplace. The more content you create online, the easier it will be for people to find you and the more chances you have to attract their specific desires and interests. Blog as often as you can, and when you do, be sure to post about the blog entry on social media with a a link that directs people back to your blog. An effective way of attracting customers to both your site and the Marketplace would be to blog about a product addition on the Marketplace, with links connected readers to the Marketplace product page within that blog, and then post about that blog on your social media.

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ApplicationsYou can also sign up for a platform to help plan and pre-schedule social media posts, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, as opposed to posting ad hoc or as they happen — especially during times when you know you will be too busy in the field but have important market dates or sales news to announce. It takes about 1-2 hours per week to schedule posts for a week, upfront, for daily posts. Facebook also allows page administrators to schedule posts in advance directly through the Facebook “create post” or “publishing tools” section. It’s great to line up the majority of your content for a week during your dedicated “admin” or office hours for the week, and then intersperse with “live” posts such as reposts, Instagram Story posts (which cannot be scheduled), and timely snapshots.

LinkTree is a free app to use the one permitted Instagram “link in bio” website address, and expand it to feature a list of links that you can adjust on your desktop or internet browser. For instance, your LinkTree can list: direct link to your next event, direct link to an article about you, direct link to product, and link to your general website/newsletter/producer directory page.

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Most applications cross-connect your social media feeds via a setting so that, in one second, you can share an Instagram post on both Facebook and Twitter. You can also edit your content before sharing, or delete the hashtags, etc. Facebook itself also offers cross posting feature, as do many email providers (including Mail Chimp) so that your email newsletter can be posted automatically on your social media feeds as well, attracting more email newsletter sign-ups. Use these cross-connect applications with consideration, so that your audience is not overwhelmed by identical content.

A helpful Instagram application is the Repost app, which allows you to share photos you like or of you when you don’t have time to take fresh photos.

Set up a Google analytics account and add the tracking code to your website. It’s simple to do and will give you a wide array of analytics information that will help you see where your website traffic is coming from, what pages visitors are spending the most time on, how many pages they view and also valuable demographic information. As reviewed in our webinar, the Marketplace will also be providing reports on user traffic and purchase patterns and we highly recommend becoming intimate with these important tools.