Social media helps you recruit participants and share your program’s impact. The platforms that work best for you will depend on your geographic location and your audience.
Trainings and resources
- Interactive training: Building Trust Through Brand: A Step-by-Step Approach
- Recorded panel: Using Social Media to Engage Your ECHO Network, a MetaECHO Community Call discussion about creating and growing social media channels
- Recorded training: LinkedIn Training, covering LinkedIn for organizations, individual profiles and posting
LinkedIn is a global professional networking and community-building platform with 1.1 billion users, most of them 25 to 34 years old. Because people use it for professional development, it is the best place to recruit attendees and speakers. Clean graphics and well-written, well-formatted text perform best.
- Graphic size: LinkedIn accepts most graphic sizes, but we recommend 1080 x 1350 px (4:5) or 1080 x 1080 px (1:1).
- Posting schedule: Post once or twice a week for the two to three weeks leading up to your session.
- Reach: Ask your speakers and partner organizations to reshare your posts with their professional networks.
We recommend creating a LinkedIn business manager so page ownership can be shared with or transferred among colleagues and your assets are kept in one place. It lets your organization centrally manage its ad accounts, LinkedIn pages and the people and businesses that work on them. Follow LinkedIn’s directions to create a business manager.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, with 3.07 billion users. Its most active users are 25 to 44 years old, with a wide range of careers and interests.
Facebook is a great place to share your story and your impact. You can recruit attendees here, but results depend heavily on your topic. Short-form video and clean, photo-heavy graphics perform best.
- Graphic size: Facebook accepts most graphic sizes, but we recommend 1080 x 1350 px (4:5) or 1080 x 1080 px (1:1).
- Posting schedule: Post once or twice a week for the two to three weeks leading up to your session.
- Paid campaigns: Paid campaigns typically perform better on Facebook than on other platforms.
Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta. We recommend creating a Meta business portfolio, which brings your Facebook and Instagram accounts together in one place so page ownership can be shared or transferred and your assets stay organized.
Instagram has 3 billion monthly active users, and its largest user group is 18 to 34 years old. In some countries, particularly high-income countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, it is as popular as Facebook or more so.
Instagram is a visual platform: every post leads with a photo or video. Short-form video performs best, and infographic-style graphics in a carousel also do well. We don’t recommend Instagram for recruitment, but it is a phenomenal way to share impact and highlight stories.
- Graphic size: Instagram recommends 1080 x 1350 px (4:5) or 1080 x 1080 px (1:1) for regular posts. Videos, called Reels, are typically 1080 x 1350 px (4:5).
- Posting schedule: Post once a week for the two to three weeks leading up to your session.
- Reach: Reshare each post to your story so more of your audience sees it.
Manage Instagram alongside Facebook in a Meta business portfolio.
TikTok
The ECHO Institute does not use TikTok for marketing. However, if your organization approves of the platform and you can commit to making short-form vertical video, TikTok is the leading place to reach 18- to 34-year-olds.
Paid campaigns
Paid campaigns are automated advertising available on every social media platform. Our partners generally find they aren’t the most effective way to recruit and retain long-term attendees, but they usually see a modest bump in attendance.
Interested in running a paid campaign? Email projectechocomms@salud.unm.edu. We recommend a starting budget of $1,000.
What you need to run a paid campaign
- Campaign purpose
- Target audience
- Budget
- Program description or content piece
- If you are recruiting for a program, you need a program description and a link to its iECHO page.
- If you are raising awareness of a program or a piece of content, such as a research article, story or video, you need a link to the program page or the content.
- Creative
- There are four ad types: single-image ads, carousels, web link ads and videos.
- For single-image ads and carousels, gather photos, quotes, data and copy to create a compelling image and call to action.
- For a web link ad, you only need copy for the body of the ad. The platform pulls a preview of the linked page, which serves as the ad’s creative.
Paid campaign examples
Program recruitment
Awareness
Donor awareness
- Purpose: Donor awareness
- Audience: Donors
Share on the ECHO Institute’s channels
To have your content shared on the ECHO Institute’s social media pages, see Share your story with us.