MAVA gets more social!
September 04, 2018By Suzanne Amrein, Executive Assistant & Communications Coordinator, MAVA 
Social media is now an integral part of MAVA’s communications, with Twitter, LinkedIn and a newsletter allowing us to share foundation and partner news with a much wider audience.
We live in a world of hyper-communication, with faster and more targeted information sharing. So MAVA decided in 2017 to join the social crowd to increase our visibility in our last funding phase and to support our partners’ communications.
After studying various social media, we started with Twitter, which seemed best suited to our needs. Indeed, it is already used a lot in the conservation world and many of our partners (our main audience) are regular users.
So now after one year, 700 tweets and 1,000 followers, what lessons have we learnt?
Twitter provides the crucial link to our blog
Twitter is a vital tool that helps us share foundation and partner news instantaneously. But it is especially useful in helping us to disseminate our blog articles. Our blog and Twitter have therefore become complementary tools: the blog being static, it needed social media to raise its visibility.
A picture tweets a thousand words!
A tweet might only be 280 characters long, but if accompanied by an image its reach is dramatically increased. Research has shown significantly higher engagement for tweets with images as opposed to dry text tweets. Indeed, a tweet with no image is almost like a day with no sunshine.
Closing the loop with LinkedIn and a newsletter
However powerful Twitter might be in directing traffic towards our blog and partner websites, it is not enough. Twitter feeds appear nonstop and have a very short shelf life. So even if we post quality information, we cannot be sure that it will reach all of our followers. So we also recently started to share information on LinkedIn, and created a newsletter. This enhanced channel mix will help us to communicate more and reach a wider public that is not necessarily on social media.
So one year on we have learned some exciting lessons, but we are still in a learning phase and open to exploring and testing new ways to meet our audience’s expectations. The new social MAVA remains flexible.