I am attending Best Friends’ No More Homeless Pets Conference for the first time this year.

Friday morning, after the opening panel discussion of the No More Homeless Pets Conference, I attended the workshop on social media, presented by Jon Dunn.

Jon is the social media PR guy for Best Friends. He’s a geek-like character who fell into the job by being on Facebook much of the time already. His focus was to share what he has learned about using social media for the good of rescue and other animal groups.

Jon was speaking primarily to the uninitiated, but expected the audience to know a little more than nothing. Some people in the audience clearly were starting at the beginning and were lost from time to time but I suspect the wash of comments still benefitted them, or at least made them curious enough to learn more.  However, an organization can find someone, even a relative or friend, who is reasonably tech-savvy, and ask that person to take on this job. Chances are such a person would enjoy the opportunity.

A few highlights:

Jon spent most of his time discussing Facebook, because it is the most successful social media application. Next, he took a bit of time on Twitter, and in between touched a bit on others.

* Note the difference between Facebook “pages” and “groups”. “Pages” are what you want for your organization.

* Get to know the apps (applications) available for your Facebook page. For example, one app allows you to twitter about something and have that tweet show up on Facebook automatically.

* Visit Facebook pages made for similar organizations and see what applications those groups use.

* Get familiar with fbml (facebook markup language) to get some custom tabs going. With custom tabs you can direct visitors to a specific page of welcome, for example, or a page on an upcoming event.

* Keep the content coming. It’s also critical to respond to comments, which is where this type web presence differs.  Social media rely on conversation.

* Allow others to contribute information. Keep it alive.

* Provide incentives to Facebook visitors, like special discounts on your organization’s shop items, to keep them reading.

* Use Facebook “causes”. Anyone can create a cause, but each has to be directed to a 501(c)(3) charity.  Even if the cause does not raise much money it can raise a lot of awareness.

*  Brand your main twitter page, making it memorable, your own.

* Use hash marks (#) to add search terms to a tweet. Thus when someone searches for specific terms your tweets will come up. The Best Friends hash ID for this conference is #09NMHP. Everyone on BF who is tweeting about the conference adds that identifier to the  post so that we can pull up all of them by searching for the term.

* Don’t try to do it all. It’s better to focus on one social media type and do it well and often than to spread your energy across several and do none of them well.

This topic has been covered well on the blog for the conference. Check the website for updates and info on all sessions.

Sections: Vegan Et Cetera
Topics: conferences