What I would do: If I was running @nzlabour ‘s social media

This is the first in a new series of posts that I will do over the coming months. It is the musings of a social media junky.

The first thing I would do would be to check all the links to Twitter accounts and Facebook pages on the Labour Party website and make sure that they all pointed to the correct, active Twitter account/Facebook pages. As mentioned in the post about Andrew Little, the account linked to from his profile on the Labour Party website is not correct.

The biggest thing I have noticed about Labour’s social media images is that there is no coherent style to them. They are all over the place. One of the key elements of branding, be in in mainstream or social media, is consistency. Having something to link all of the work together, to help place it in a wider context, to show it as being part of something larger.

Pick a style, stick to it, build a brand identity.

Labour have obviously been running a campaign around the slogan “I’m in”. This is a good idea. However, extend the branding to everyone. It is not that hard to supply all of your MPs with pre sized header images, or images for use on Twitter profiles. 

Having something to tie all of the party profiles together will benefit the party, as well as the MPs.

Give the MPs/Candidates who are new to Twitter, or are not active on it, a cheat sheet on how to do things well. Explain to them about hashtags, in fact, feel free to point them at my advice for MPs/Candidates on Twitter post. Make it clear to them, if you are on Twitter, use it. There is no point in being on Twitter and having an account with 6 Tweets, all form 2 years ago on it. If you are not going to use it, don’t have it at all.

The same rules apply to social media as apply to any media, stay on message, build brand identity, keep the message out there.