We recently undertook some Social Media training for the Islington Youth Council.  The Youth Council are a millennial savvy bunch when it comes to social media but it’s important to remember that using social media on a personal level is different to using it to represent your business, brand or enterprise.

As Youth Councillors they need to reach out to other young people in Islington to spread their campaigns and reach their target audience.  The main platforms for young people are Instagram and Snapchat.  However they also need to build their presence amongst like minded organisations, connections and influencers who are mainly present on Twitter, and possibly Facebook.  We therefore decided to structure the training around the role of Keywords and Hashtags as part of any businesses online presence.  On a professional level these elements are key to any social media campaign so we felt this would be valuable knowledge for them moving into social media on a professional level.

E-Safety
We began the session buy highlighting the importance of staying safe online,  there are several videos available but we chose this one Easy Ways to Stay Safe on Social Networks as it clearly sets out the three areas of e-safety: Sharing, Privacy & Settings, and Location Settings.

Keywords
We then moved on to explain the importance of keywords.  How web developers pick specific words which sum up web pages and incorporate them into the text on the website.  These keywords and search terms are picked up by search engines to match up websites to online searches.  It is therefore essential that you know your target audience and you know what they will be searching for when they’re looking for your service.   It is important to remember that Google rewards relevance, so your website needs to contain the content relevant to your business.

Hashtags

Having looked at Keywords we could then move on to the important roll that Hashtags play in any social media campaign. Once a # is entered in front of a word it becomes a clickable link taking you to a page featuring the feed of all the most recent tweets/posts that contain that hashtag.   You can then search for others using the same hashtag and connect with like-minded people and accounts.

We looked at topics which the Islington Youth Council will tackle over the coming year including: Apprenticeships, Diversity and Careers Advice to try and come up with some hashtags they could use when posting on Twitter and Instagram.  Initially we searched manually in Twitter and Instagram to see what related hashtags people were using for these topics.  For apprenticeships we picked #apprenticeships #apprentice #GetinGoFar. We particularly liked #GetinGoFar as it has been used for apprenticeship campaigns up and down the country so is a handy one to jump on.

We then looked at a web tool called www.keyhole.co which you can test out hashtags to see how popular they might be and for related ones shown in a word cloud.  We picked #workexperience which we had selected when researching Careers Advice.  Here is what keyhole showed us:

We then ended the session by asking the Youth Council to come up with a list of hashtags that they will use in their identity and campaign.

We look forward to seeing these integrated into their Instagram and Twitter accounts.  Do follow their progress with us!