TO: Jessica Piffero

FROM: Gerald Arneson and Kristina Flores

SUBJECT: Social Media Audit

DATE: September 30, 2015

As generations have changed over the years so has an organizations ability to spread up to date information to the public through social media. Social media helps an organization develop a brand can be beneficial if used in the right terms.

After analyzing the organizations Facebook and Twitter, it is obvious that the organization has numerous strengths with their content. The Red Cross has extensive content to keep the community up to date with current disaster relief efforts throughout the Central Valley and the rest of the country.

Although there could be a better relation between the hashtags that correlate to real time and present time situations, the American Red Cross does an amazing job using original hashtags for their content. It is impressive to see the amount of up to date information that the Red Cross shares about the recent fires. Not only did they spread information but also shared tools in order to get help through the volunteers in order to stop this fire.

The Red Cross social networks of choice are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Their Facebook and Twitter are up to date daily with information for the community but their Instagram is lacking the amount of information that both Facebook and Twitter share. They typically post one photo about every month on average, not nearly enough to keep Instagramers as interested as they could be.

Looking at Facebook more thoroughly in relation to the strategy of posts, the frequency in which posts happen may need to be tweaked. Specifically, on August 29th, 2015; the Facebook posted about Katrina and how they served numerous amount of people during the time. Although the content in which the organization was good content, the time showed about 4-5 posts all taking place at the same time. The posts may have been better suited throughout the day as they may have filled up followers timelines all at once in order to get a better communication to the public about what they were doing to help with such a tragedy.

Another strength that The American Red Cross of the Central Valley has is the lack of funding requests on their social media. It is very unbecoming of an organization to constantly post for financial help on their social media and the Red Cross does a wonderful job of posting original content not related to monetary funding.

In order for the organization to get more followers, it may be helpful to share posts from local news channels on information that is related to the goals and objectives of the organization. The second way for the organization to gain more followers on their social media would be to have more of a presence in the community at local events. I personally have worked for a non-profit organization and have attended numerous community events and do not recall seeing a booth of representative for The American Red Cross of the Central Valley. Although the Red Cross benefits from Taste of Riverpark, that is not nearly enough networking to gain the following that they do need. With a limited staff and an enormous amount of information and content to cover, more of a public presence may increase the amount of followers on each of their social media outlets.

Knowing that posting information daily is extremely difficult for non-profit organizations, I feel as though Red Cross could really benefit from the use of Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media site that helps keep track of content that is necessary to the public. It helps share content at the right time to the public with up to date information.

I think that the organization has enough information and program in order to post once a day when there happens to be downtime of crisis’, but when there is a serious event there should be no more than two or three per day. Information is constantly changing and posting retime information more frequently can be concentrated on Twitter.

Negative feedback is not something I think the organization deals with often after reading through some of the comments on posts. Most of the people who follow the non-profit organization do not have anything negative to say and is thankful of the work that the organization does. If there were any negative comments, I would just suggest the non-profit organization directly message the commenter and see how they would be able to resolve the issue. If the issue is resolved I would assume the commenter would remove the post.

The source of content tends to be mostly original on the page. Only a few times does the organization share a post from the Red Cross of America page. The content is mostly up to date information about current events, safety information and hot topics.

The organization does a fantastic job of spreading information about its numerous areas of involvement. Because of the recent fires there has been a lot of content covering the fire, but prior to that they posted about veterans, safety information and training programs. Most of this information includes a photo of some kind along with it and these same pictures could be posted to its Instagram account with different copy as to not cut and paste.

I think that evaluation of social media is crucial to the organization. I think depending on the circumstances, once every two weeks would be a good amount of time for evaluation. With events such as the fire lasting a lot longer than anyone would want, most of the information would consist of those tragic events but afterwards and evaluation of the direction you would like to continue would be extremely beneficial to get back into a flow of information.