CERO Progress: Testing Social Media

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This week CERO embarked on its first social media adventure. We wanted to see how CERO could fit into a large community that cares about composting, and could collectively pressure local restaurants and grocery stores to adopt this practice.

We noticed that #whycompost had not been used in years, so we thought that CERO could use it to generate buzz around a set of “fun facts” about the environmental costs of not composting. Since last Friday was Earth Day, we planned to soft launch our #whycompost campaign, and released one of our fun fact banners on twitter and facebook:

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We linked our posts to a landing page where folks who are interested in helping out with the compost movement can sign up: http://whycompost.instapage.com/?platform=hootsuite. Here are a few things we learned from this very short experiment:

  • We noticed that CERO’s twitter account was not validated, which meant that if you searched #whycompost, none of our tweets were showing up. CERO’s social media in the past had only been reaching its current followers, an issue that we were able to resolve this week

  • As Sasha mentioned, tweets that had a picture were much more successful than those that were just text based (based on our small sample size of three posts)

  • While we got more retweets than CERO’s posts normally get (granted, many were from members of this class) only 6 people clicked our landing page linked, and only one person signed up. We will have to brainstorm ways to make this more powerful and attractive for folks (or decide that this isn’t something people are interested in doing)

Moving forward, we are hoping to fully launch our #whycompost campaign at the DiscoTech. We learned that the first full week in May (May 1-7) is “compost awareness week”, which will be convenient for us to plug into: http://compostingcouncil.org/icaw/. We are planning to make more banners like the one above and post tweets everyday about composting fun facts, especially ones that are more focused on the “why” than the “how” side of this issue. We are planning to message and email partners who could help amplify this campaign with their own reasons for composting.