An Analytical Analysis and Report of the Jewish Child Care

Associations Social Media Practices

Sara West
Pace University
November 12, 2015

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Executive Summary
The purpose of this analytical report is to make Vice Presidents Richard Hucke and Joe Roazzie
and the Marketing team at the JCCA aware of the social media platforms that we have.

I have conducted research pertaining to our involvement on seven social media platforms, which
I will share as well as suggestions I have to further our reach. I will emphasize our past
interaction patterns on these sites and elaborate on how we can improve post quality and increase
overall followers, popularity, and ultimately our community support.

The following contains an in-depth report of each social media platform we are already involved
in. I break down the analytics of these social media platforms and give my opinion on how we
can improve. Some improvements will include changing content and increasing the number of
posts we make per week. I also give examples of which platforms we can nix from our
repertoire, in order to strength our efforts in the stronger programs we already have in place.

With some slight adjustments to the Public Relations and Social Media teams, we can improve
our impact and digital reach through upgrading and refining our already active accounts.

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Introduction
As a part of your Public Relations team, I have been researching the Jewish Child Care
Associations social media presence on the interactive platforms we already use, which include:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Google+

Pinterest

YouTube

FourSquare

Although there are other social media platforms available, I have chosen to focus on what we
have in terms of social media. Perhaps in the future, we can expand even more to other social
media websites and applications.

Situation Description
The first thing I did was analyze the current social media status of all the platforms we, the
JCCA, are involved in.

Facebook:
The Facebook link itself is found on a badge near the top of the website. Upon further
investigation, I found that the last post was made within the last 24 hours on October 20, 2015 at
12:11 PM. The post itself was a very powerful post because it incorporated a shared post from
the famous Humans Of New York (HONY) social photography project. We took the HONY

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photo (and caption) and expanded on what HONY had written, making the post more
specifically about foster care, adoption, and family. Other posts included individual pictures that
were linked to albums of pictures from recent events. Friends and followers frequently
posted on our feed and sometimes we responded or liked the posts. Overall, we posted at least
once or twice a week. Success is a hard thing to have qualitative measurements on, however, we
do have over 1,400 likes. This is a strong following, but it can always go up.

Twitter:
The Twitter badge was also near the Facebook badge, on the main homepage. This post
was also made October 22, 2015 and was about a personal story about one of their current
mentors and showing the easy steps to become a mentor themselves. For example, the post
talked about the training the mentor went through as well as how the training paid off and has
helped the mentor when with their resident in the program.
We have a good use of hashtags and interactive links in the posts. In addition, we are
very consistent in posting, with about three to five posts a week that are related to something the
JCCA was involved in. However, unlike the little audience interaction on Facebook, there was
zero JCCA-to-audience interaction on the Twitter account. On average, we would have about
one person comment back, like, or retweet one of our weekly Tweets. It should be our goal to
make this number grow.

Instagram:
Our Instagram name/address are given in the Facebook General Information section.
The last post was made over 13 weeks ago, so regular posting is definitely a problem on the

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Instagram account. The Instagram profile does get decent audience interaction and quite a few
hearts which translates to content that people like. Most of the pictures were taken from
events we have sponsored or been a part of; and many of the photos were powerful action shots
taken live at our events and really showed what goes on behind the scenes. For example, we
posted a ton of Instagram photos from the last event we were a part of, The Parade of
Champions.
Another persuasive element of our Instagram account is the use of photos with blurbs that
talk about volunteers and their involvement, as well as success stories from clients and past
residents. These kinds of posts humanize the programs and help to show how important we are
to the community.

Google+:
The Google+ link was also given in the General Information section on our Facebook.
As little as people use Google+, I found it surprising that our last post was actually made on
September 4, 2015. However, before this post, it had been over six weeks since we had posted.
In addition, photos on Google+ have not been updated since June 2014. In addition, I could not
find there to be any followers or people in our circles and there was no interaction. Needless
to say, this is not considered regular posting. Although Google+ is not obsolete, I feel it would
be better to focus our energy on our more active accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
and even our Pinterest accounts.

Pinterest:

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The Pinterest link information is found on the General Information section on our
Facebook page. Unfortunately, I was unable to see when the last Pinterest pin (what Pinterest
considers posts) was made. Our Pinterest page included seven Boards, which are basically
collections of pictures and links from websites that we felt were important or interesting enough
to share with our followers. Also, there was no audience interaction, even though we have 25
followers. Overall, the seven boards only had about 21 pins which is relatively low and shows
our lackadaisical inactivity.

YouTube:
The YouTube link is given on the General Information section on Facebook as well.
The last post was made over three years ago and was about a 2011 Arts in Action JCCA event
with around 200 views. Overall, we had six uploaded videos with a range of 200 to 2,000 views.
There is no consistency in what we upload or the content of what we upload. The topics ranged
from adoption, to sponsored events, and spotlights on people involved with the JCCA. In my
opinion, we need to follow through with one message and focus on what we are going to push
to our YouTube audience.

FourSquare:
This information was included on the General Information section on Facebook. There
was nothing linked to this. No visitors and no audience interactions or posts from anyone.
The purpose of FourSquare is to get points for checking in to places online. For
example, every time someone checks into the Pleasantville McDonalds, they get a point and the
establishment gets another point that boosts their rating. However, after doing research, I think it

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would be safe to delete this as an interaction platform for us all together. The check-in style
social media application and idea is dead and we should be focusing our attention on more stable
apps that are more popular with our audience, such as Instagram and Twitter.

Analysis
Organic social media content is one of the most sincere ways to connect with our audience. Not
only does our social media show what we are; it is a way to show what we stand for and what we
do to help the community of Westchester County. In addition, social media helps to connect,
ironically, on a one-on-one basis while mass-producing a message. Each audience member takes
away something different from the posts according to their experiencesand this is what adds
worth to each post.

Consistency is definitely key! We need to be posting things that are not only consistent with the
organizations credo and feel, but we also need to be posting content regularly. With the
exception of Facebook and Twitter, all our other social media accounts were updated a couple
times a month or sporadically over several years. Posting consistently means at least three to
four posts per platform per week. These posts can be inter-connected and include the same
content, or we can creative novel posts for each platform.

In order for us to truly connect with our audience, we need to work on and maintain our sincerity
per post. Our entire organization is focused on helping the community, especially children. It is
very easy to tell when content is contrived, and as a nonprofit organization, audience and
community trust and support is essential to our success. Along those lines, it is important to stay

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honest and straightforward. Although some of our information can be upsetting, such as
statistics about abuse, it is our job to deliver the facts to the people and then ease the blow by
telling the audience how we are helping remedy the situation. We need to keep the image of the
company in the spotlight, but only in the best way possible. By keeping our posts up-to-date and
relevant for the audience, we not only have accountability to our audience but we build a
reputation of showing our stellar work.

Potential Course of Action

This analytic report is the first step of my course of action. I am giving you this report in hopes
of broadening and strengthening our cyber reach. So far, the JCCA Pleasantville is using the
aforementioned social media platforms to do the following:

Connect with our audience, the members of the Westchester County community.

By strengthening our reach, we will show the community how we contribute to

the well being of Westchester.

Successes have been few and far between for many of our previous social media campaigns.
However, I have developed a plan of action to help the social media platforms evolve into
something more prolific.

The bottom line is: we could take better advantage of our social media accounts and social media
footprint. This includes creating more content, posting more frequently (especially during peak
posting times), deleting unnecessary profiles (such as FourSquare and Google+), and updating
our relevant profiles to be more inviting and visually pleasing.

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I suggest putting together a social media team of volunteers that are already involved in the
organization, but also have a love for social media. This way, their content is more likely to be
easy for them to post, structured, and organic to what is actually going on here. The social media
team could also work with the marketing or advertising team (especially at first) in order to get
help on how to make our posts more aesthetically pleasing and appealing. We can start to
brainstorm on different hashtags to make things consistent and interactive. For example, every
week on Monday we could feature a #MondayMotivation and have a story about something
that a volunteer is doing well or working hard with and feature everything that volunteer does. I
think within two or three meetings between the social media team, we can come up with more
content and hashtags.

We need to work on the times in which we post as well. According to AdWeek, these are the
best times to post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (to name a few), in order to
gain the most interaction from your audience:
For Facebook, Thursdays and Fridays are the best days to post content. The best time to
post this content is at 1:00 PM for the most shares and at 3:0 PM for the most likes (AdWeek,
2015).
Twitter is a little different, because the AdWeek infographic article breaks the analytics
down into two groups: Business To Business (B2B) and Business To Consumer (B2C). For
B2B, weekdays provide 14% more engagement for weekends (AdWeek, 2015). That totally
makes sense, because most businesses are conducting business during the week versus during the
weekend. Therefore, it would be in our best interest to post things (like the HONY post) that

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directly relates to other companies on Mondays through Fridays. For B2C posts, engagements
[on Twitter] are highest on weekends and Wednesdays (AdWeek, 2015). Furthermore,
according to Dan Zarrella on AdWeek, Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on
weekends (AdWeek, 2015). In regards to Twitter, the timeframe in which to receive the most
interactions is between 12 noon and 6:00 PM, with 5:00 PM being the time with the most
retweets.
For Instagram posts, we need to focus on posting during off work hours throughout the
week, but especially on Mondays. AdWeek does not address why Mondays and off work hours
are best, but I would assume it is because people do not check their Instagrams as often as other
social media websites when they are at work.
To increase our Pinterest re-pinning and interaction, we need to pin more between the
hours of 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM, and especially make sure to be pinning on Saturdays.
According to AdWeek, this is the time when the most active Pinterest users are on Pinterest.

We also need to update profiles to be more visually pleasing. According to Lindsay Kolowich, a
social media blogger, 63% of social media is made up of images and nearly 66% of updates on
social media are visual content. This is a startling majority, especially when you look at our
social media posts and realize that with the exception of Instagram (which requires you to put a
picture in your post), over half of our social media posts do not incorporate any images.
Kolowich goes on to say that, images are the number one most important factor in optimal
social media content. Kolowich gives nine major ways you can include more image content in
your social media messages:

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We need to use eye-catching, creative photography. Already, in our Instagram account
we use pictures, however, instead of using such contrived and staged pictures, we need to try to
get more action shots of what is going on at the event or even just on the JCCA campus that
day.
We already have a YouTube channel, so that is the perfect venue to help us to use videos.
As I stated, we have not uploaded a video in over three years. We need to put a team in place to
start taking videos, even if they are just little 15-30 second videos, of what is going on the JCCA
campus. We can then upload these videos to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and show our
audience what is new at the JCCA.
We can use screenshots to help us show progress we are making towards our goals. For
example, for the recent fundraiser we are currently running, we could screenshot how far along
we are to making our goal. This is also a way to incorporate two other ways Kolowich suggests
to use images, by using data visualizations and infographicss. Infographics are easy on the eyes,
help you to understand information quickly, and are fun and simple to make. This could also
include visual note taking and miscellaneous graphics, other ways that Kolowich believes
you can build the aesthetic appeal of your social media posts.
We could also incorporate comics, but not just random comics. We should use comics
that the children and residents of the Cottage Schools make themselves. Not only would this
involve the residents, but also it would humanize us more and show that everyone in the JCCA
community has a voice.
Lastly, Kolowhich says you can boost your image appeal with memes. Urban Dictionary
online defines a meme as, an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads
throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance or horizontally by cultural

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acquisition (Urban Dictionary online). More or less, memes are cultural things that are passed
around virtually, by word of mouth, and through social media that express trending ideologies.
If we start to incorporate more memes into social media, I think we will appeal to a younger,
more hip audience, which would grow our audience. As of right now, it seems that everyone
in our audience is only a part of our audience because they are somehow connected to the JCCA.

We have important content we just need to harness a catchy way to make it more engaging and
then actually engage with our public. Too many times I found that even when we had our
audience engage, we did not engage back that is a huge missed opportunity!

Conclusion
It is imperative that we change our social media plan if we are to gain and maintain social media
credibility. Throughout this report, I have outlined several ways in which we can re-align our
social media strategy for optimal reach and connectivity. If we make these changes and act on
the potential plans of action I have suggested, we can not only immediately increase our social
media clout, but also have a stronger and more productive social media hold in our audiences
everyday lives within the next 16 month period.

Social media is ever changing, and we need to be able to keep up with the change of pace so we
do not get lost in the everyday hustle and bustle.

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References

Bennett, Shea. (January 6, 2015). What are the best times to post on #Facebook, #Twitter and
#Instagram? (Infographic). Retrieved on November 11, 2015 from
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/best-time-to-post-social-media/504222

Kolowich, Lindsay. (March 30, 2015). A handy little guide to creating visual content for social
media. (Infographic). Retrieved on November 11, 2015 from
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-creation-social-media

Meme. (n.d.). In Urban Dictionary online. Retrieved November 12, 2015 from
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meme.