How To Use Social Media in Conjunction with Your Economic Development Website
16 Aug 2021
News, Marketing, Website Development
Social media plays a powerful role in many people's lives. Harnessing that power can allow your EDO to engage with important stakeholders on a meaningful level, promote your brand, and drive considerable traffic to your website. EDOs that understand the most efficient and effective ways to make the use of those "free" resources have a great advantage. Social media finesse is a skill anyone can learn.
In addition to building a broader awareness of your community, social media can strategically increase transparency and improve the level of public service your EDO provides. That loyalty and trust will help build your brand by strengthening relationships, highlighting opportunities, and serving as a ready resource for crisis communication.
Tried and True Tips on Using Social Media with Your Economic Development Website
1. Make it easy to share information by including "share this" widgets on your site.
2. Harness the power of hashtags. They can be specific to your location or as general as #siteselection or #workforceattraction depending on context, goals, and strategy.
3. Encourage your local businesses and organizations to create and maintain an active social media presence and use that networking to strengthen a shared, collective sense of community.
4. Remember that "social" is the operative word in "social media." Everything you post is an opening for dialogue, not a one-sided broadcast. One way to handle this efficiently is to anticipate common/obvious comments and questions ahead of time, prepare good responses, and have them at the ready.
5. Encourage and facilitate real-time conversations with people you want to reach.
6. Facilitate panel discussions and other constructive dialogue among stakeholders to establish yourselves as thought leaders, and portray a positive and progressive shared vision in your community.
7. Create posts that demonstrate your EDO's dedication to long-term community support.
8. Elicit comments and feedback that will give you an honest feel for the sentiment in, around, and about your community.
9. Use the power of photography, video, and VR to showcase locations for the benefit of site selectors far and wide.
10. Use your social media following to cultivate an ever-growing contact database for newsletters and more.
11. Use social media to promote important local events in your community, and then personally invite site selectors and stakeholders to those events.
12. Get mileage from your stories and posts by using various social media platforms to share article snippets that will drive traffic to your website.
13. Keep some topics front and center by posting about them regularly. Stories about your long-standing incentives and initiatives belong in this category.
14. Maintain the high morale and stellar image of your team members and local business leaders by using social media to celebrate their achievements.
15. Create and share local jobs and workforce development posts as often as possible.
16. Promote your online presence offline by including QR codes and/or social media handles in all of your marketing materials and signage.
17. Keep an eye on your analytics to know which platforms and posts are high performers.
If you need more help in implementing a plan on how to use social media in conjunction with your economic development website, Golden Shovel Agency is here to help. Contact us and we'll assess your needs and come up with a plan unique to your community.
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