Bats crush on Instagram?

Good morning!

Welcome to 30 Second Social Studies.

Here’s the agenda for today:

• Bats crush on social?

• Advice for one person teams from a one person team

Thanks so all the one person social teams who replied to my email!

Loved seeing all the accounts that you’re working on.

I want to highlight one in particular.

Shoutout to Rachel Harper, BCI’s SMM for sharing the profile and for sharing her advice for other one person teams.

How much time would you say you spend working on social and what other areas do you oversee?

“I spend the majority of my time gathering stories/media from the program staff at my org. If you include that, I spend about 75% of my time on social media in my role. I also support our email strategy, blogs, data asset management, and website, along with paid social strategy. And sometimes I even go out into the field with our conservation teams and get native photo/video!”

How long have you been running social? What changes have you overseen in audience size and engagement?

“I’ve been in the social space about 10 years now, so I’ve pretty much seen it all. I came to BCI about two year ago (it’s an amazing org to work for!) and we’ve grown the most on IG and Tiktok (which I had to start from scratch). I’d say our audience has grown about 30% (we had a big following on Facebook to begin with that has stayed pretty steady). The first-mover advantage is essential, so we’re already on Threads which is basically reposts from X or IG, maybe the occasional quip.

Obviously engagement has dropped significantly in the last ten years, but with platforms like TikTok, BCI has seen growth and been able to tweak our content to keep engagement rates high. We’ve found a good balance of post frequency while maintaining quality content (5x a week) and definitely utilize the crossposting to other channels strategy you mentioned in your email (ie- if you make a Reel, might as well post it to TT and Shorts). While we do post to Facebook, we don’t make any original content for it. However we use the event and fundraising features often, so we have to be active. We also run ads there.”

Who is your audience and what is your main goal with social?

“Our main audience is people who generally like bats but don’t know much about them. It’s great to have people want to learn about the number of bat species (1,459 and counting) or the important role they play in the ecosystem (pest control, pollination, seed dispersal, etc)

Admittedly though, my favorite audience is the converts, people who didn’t really like bats before but “thought that video was really cute.” I make a lot of content to introduce people to bats in a friendly way.”

How do you plan your schedule to maximize your results on social without eating up too much of your time?

“The most important factor for my efficiency tools! I can’t imaging not having a social calendar/publishing tool. We use Sprout. It isn’t perfect and could include more functionality, but none of them are. It helps me see my content at a glance so I can balance fun/educational/asks without cannibalizing any content. It also makes it easy to schedule to multiple platforms at once, saving me time.

My tip to anyone trying to create content is this- find out what your natural rhythm is. When does your brain feel creative and active and focused? For me, I can only make really good content in the afternoons. The captions and ideas come easily. I’ve learned that trying to force content can get you by, but probably won’t captivate your audience.

I love the analytics tab in Sprout, it’s really easy to see a general overview (which I also get emailed to me weekly) and take an in-depth look at each platform. They also export these fancy-looking reports that I can send to my boss. But in general, anyone managing a social account will probably naturally see what content is performing best when they have to go in and respond to a bunch of comments, and alternatively if you spend hours on a post only for it to flop. Social has a built-in reward system that encourages the content people want to see.”

My 2 Cents

BCI is crushing on social because they create content that feels like it was made for social. (Because it WAS made for social).

Hey! You’re still here!