ONLINE ACTIVISM WITH
FACEBOOK / TWITTER / BLOGGING AND
INSTAGRAM
(mainly covering TWITTER/facebook )
1. Why should I be in social media at all?
Social media like facebook, twitter and instagram , are a powerful way to do ‘’online activism’’ if you ,for
some reason, do not want to do ‘’direct action’’( march on the streets, send paper letters of complaints to
authorities etc). Or you can do both offline and online (social media) activisms for topics that engage you as
citizen.
The purpose of this pdf is to show you why social media can make a difference and convince you to think
before crafting each post in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Remember that many businesses, ask their clients to reach out for complaints on Twitter or Facebook these
days, not by email.
Many governments have accounts on Twitter and Facebook where citizens can directly mention a problem.
(and you can find if your government, your local municipaliy, your local supermarket, have a twitter or
facebook account, by merely searching them in Google adding ‘’twitter account’’ or ‘’facebook account’’.
Here is an example of how powerful social media can be, for citizens, a case study from Greece during
covid19 crisis and the curfew that asked people stay indoors and do not go out unless for serious reasons.
So, the Greek Gov during covid19 forbade swimming in sea.
Next day, a woman posted photos of herself and her autistic son in the Greek Prime Minister’s facebook
page.
Source of a news article about how this woman changed the law by explaining to the Prime Minister on
Facebook (on his Page not his profile) that her son might suffer from the law forbidding swimming during
covid19 curfew law.
www.athensvoice.gr/greece/635826_pos-o-giannis-poy-ehei-aytismo-espase-tin-apagoreysi-kolymvisis
You can use Google Translate for the Greek article above, but I will explain briefly below.
She said her son cannot do therapy without swimming in sea for 2 months of the curfew.
She asked politely that the prime minister allows people who have medical reasons to be excempt from
the law against swimming in sea.
Result: The Prime Minister of Greece next day the woman posted her comment to his page, asked his
associates to announce in TV that people who have medical certifications from their doctors that
they need the sea for therapy, as excempt from the law during covid19 social distancing regarding
prohibition to swim in the sea.
Of course one can say the prime minister could ignore her.
Possibly he did not ignore her because she posted photos of her self
and her son and wrote a POLITE non-aggressive PLEA arguing that
some people will lose their therapeutical effect of swimming in sea for 2
full months. She did not post an aggressive text or photo.
Some people post aggressive non-argumental messages to the government officials in facebook or
twitter and that is not going to get an answer usually.
It is best to make a plea in public using the power of photos and a text that asks politely for an answer.
For example, is an area in your city experiencing crime too much?
You can post pictures of vandalism and news that speak of violent acts as a commentary in your local
Mayor’s page in facebook or in twitter and politely ask for an answer about what the mayor is planning to do
for it.
2. Why should I include hashtags in my twitter, facebook and
instagram posts?
Hachtags starting with # and a word or sentence (example #diem25proposals #italydiem25 #justice
#humanrights) help your texts to be FOUND by both Google and users on of those networks.
If someone searched for ‘’homeless people in Romania”’
your twit or facebook post may appear readily to him/her. If you add #Iasio (city in Romania) then any
searching for ‘’iasio’ related twitter texts, they will see YOUR TWIT better than if you did not include the city
with a hashtag in front, #Iasio and #romania
Example picture: This is a fine twit but I forgot to add tags so that I maybe get some discussion started
(maybe, they dont always reply). I have to keep my message civil and not attack the gov or use language
that would make others flag my post and possibly disable my twitter/facebook account.
So here in this picture below I use hashtags related to my topic but I forgot to tag relevant authorities that
could potentially answer me. ..
I go to Google to find out if the Romanian Govenrment has a twitter account. (see next picture)
Now my twit is more complete, it asks a question about human rights in Iasio Romania and is directed by
tagging the Romanian Goverment in Twitter.
My question may sound naive but often politicians do answer especially when a question is combined
with a photo. A photo, especially if it is YOUR OWN PHOTO (YOUR OWN COPYRIGHT) AND IS
SHOWS WHAT THE PROBLEM IS (IN THIS EXAMPLE, HOMELESS IN IASI ROMANIA)
If I dont have a photo of my own (which is highly advisable as ‘’fresh content’’ is liked by the Google
and social media content algorythms…) then I can pick a photo from Google provided I am allowed
to re-use the photo in my own content in Twitter/Facebook.
So I search in Google Images about ‘’iasio homless’’ and find this below
My next step is to see if I have the right legally to share an image. Most of the time it is ok, sharing it on
twitter, without caring for the image copyrights, if there is NO SIGN on the image indicated its copyrighted, or
if there is no watermark, or if it comes from a news outlet (usually they dont have a problem if their pictures
are put on twitter especially if you mention the source of the image).
If your twit /facebook/instagram acitivity IS NOT CONNECTED ANYHOW TO FUNDING OR MONETARY
ENDS then you can assume its ok to use a picture from Google but there are ways to be absolutely sure,
click TOOLS and then then use license (see photos below) In my case here I dont find ANY photos with
license to reuse so I can actually just take the link to an article talking about homeless in Iasio and the
include it in my twit.
SEE NEXT PHOTO
AND BELOW YOU SEE WHEN I SEARCH FOR NON-COMMECIAL REUSE I FIND NOT PHOTO, SO ITS
SAFEST NOT TO USE ANY OF THEM IN MY TWIT, BUT I CAN STILL LINK TO THE ARTICLE
CONTAINING PICTURES OF HOMELESS PEOPLE IN IASIO ROMANIA
Finally, I included just the link since I found no photo with clear re-use license and posted a twit
tagging the Romanian Government in Twitter (same can be done in Facebook)
The result is below:)
3. Should I try to have thousands of followers by following
thousands of accounts in twitter?
No, that is not going to raise your social account validity. It shows that you are desperate to
appear as if you are an ‘’influencer’’ (google ‘’’social media influencer if you want to know
what that is)
It is though good not to follow 500 accounts while only 50 accounts follow you back. There has
to be a balance.
Its best that you follow 20 people and 18 of them follow you back and over time and as
you ENGAGE in discussions by leaving comments to other people’s twits you will naturally get
some followers. (see below why engagement is of vital importance to the success of your social
media activism),
You will eventually get followers but it will take time and you need patience. For the first six
months this should not worry you too much. Try to keep a balance of how many you follow and
how many follow you back but dont seek to have ‘’thousands’’ of followers in a short time.
4. So I just write a text, add a hashtag related to the area /
country / city/ topic my text is about, then that is all?
No! You have to do more than that in social media online activism. You have to ENGAGE
into other people’s texts and start conversations.
The social media is all about online conversations, not just texting your own
news/views/opinions.
For a dialogue to start, use the @ symbol.
Find which influencer /politician /local authority is in twitter /facebook/instagram and then use
the @ and their chosen username to directly notify them that you are protesting/asking them
somewthing/raising awareness about something. You can find if a person a celebrity an
organisation or a government and so on havea twitter or facebook account by googling them
simply adding ‘’twitter’’ or ‘facebook’’ like
Searching in google for ‘human rights twitter accounts’’ I found
@HumanRightsforRefugees (just an example)
Example of a twit using both tagging @ and hashtags relevant to my topic in the page next.
@HumanRightsforRefugees
Hello, do you know that the hotspots in
Greece have covid19 already?
#refugeecamps #greece #humanrights
#covid19
If they dont reply to you, dont take it at heart. Usually they don’t and this is not always because
they don’t want to reply. They may not see your question soon or they may not always be 24/7
there to answer. You may get an answer days /weeks later or never.
The point here is, you made the question, their were ‘’tagged’’ with the @ symbol and their
username, and then you used REVELANT hashtags, so your twit will be seen by others. The
beautiful thing about social networks is that those ‘’others’’ may engage in the discussion you
try to start and they may even be able to answer you or debate you. ( Note here that
sometimes you may get trolls - search google for ‘’social network trolls’’ to find out what they
are- and they try to just stop the conversation you started by attacking someone or insulting
etc). You can flag (twitter and facebook and instagram have special flag buttons around each
twit and you can flag someone for being violent, spammer etc. )
See my example below, notice that apart from using hashtags related to my topic IN MY
TEXT (so that this way I save space since twitter does not allow longs texts) I also added
many accounts using @ that | hope they reply to me or at least see my twit. Also notice that I
used a ‘’popular hashtag’’. On the right side of your twitter screen or on your smartphone
somewhere you will see ‘’trending topics’’. These are topics people speak about RIGHT
NOW/TODAY. You maximize your impact if you use one of them but if they are unrelated to
your text and topic, then you propably should not use them. Here I incorporated the trending
topic #socialdistance that is high on trends in twitter TODAY to add some more ‘’push’’ to my
twit although once can say I overstetched it a bit because social distancing refers to humans
not animals. Still it is a word I can use if I think it does not do harm to my topic and it will raise
the chance of my twit to be seen by as many people as possible, especially today when this
topic is a ‘’trend’’ in twitter.
5) Apart from using tagging to speak directly to other accounts in
twitter or facebook or instagram, what else can I do to create a
conversation around the topic I do online volunteering for?
More engagement helps you raise your PRESENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA.
Re-twit other people’s twits!
Just hit ‘’share’’ under THEIR twit if its a twit you agree with. If you are raising awareness for animal rights,
and an account in twitter says something you like, you can retweet them (see picture below in which you
click on this sign in red circle to retweet and add this very twit on YOUR profile in twitter) . This notifies the
person whois twit you shared and they may like your twit in return (in gratitude often) or even comment with
‘thank you for re-twitting’.
https://twitter.com/FARMUSA/status/1250398476720095232
You can use this re-twit tecnique to fill up your profile with news about your topic, the topic you want to raise
awareness about.
This means you use other people’s CONTENT (pictures and text).
This is a lazy way to do social media awareness campaign but it works.
If you dont have the time to take your own photos of a topic you care about and want to reaise awareness for
it, or you cannot find photos in Google that give you the license to re-use them for non-commercial online
activism purposes, and you are bored crafting your own text, you can still JUST SHARE CONTENT BY
OTHERS impact the topic you care about in twitter and facebook
Twitter and facebook and even instagram have a search bar, you can search there for a topic and find
accounts that have content you can start re-twitting and adding your own ‘’narration’’in your own twitter or
facebook profile or page.
By the way, in Facebook is best to create a Page than using your own personal profile to do ‘’online
activism’’ to raise awareness for a topic.
This way you seperate your personal life in facebook from your online activism.
You can create a Page , it is for free and you are not paying for it The problem is it is not easy to find HOW
one can start their own page in facebook. And each smartphone or desktop computer that we use to access
facebook will place that in different place. So look around and maybe google ‘’how do i start a page in
facebook’’. If you are using smartphone search in Google for ‘’how do i start a page in Facebook with mobile
phone’’. You should find your way around it soon enough. Then you can post there, like a blog actually.
The next few pages in this pdf will be about Instagram. Most of the tecniques prescribed above for twitter will
almost identically be used in facebook.
But instagram is a different beast. It is 100% visual. In Twitter and Facebook you can avoid pictures but
Instagram is mainly a picture or video (short duration of video) you post plus tiny bit of text just like in twitter
plus hashtags and tags (if you can cram it all together in one!).
Instagram is less popular than twitter and facebook. Ideally you are doing online activisim raising awareness
in both Facebook and Twitter and if you have extra time, then you can add Instagram. Or if you are a team of
volunteers for an NGO, you can split the tasks, someone will be resonsible for Facebook, another person for
Twitter and a third person for Instagram.
6) How to I use Instagram to raise awareness for a topic (Online
Activism)?
In Instagram you sign in with your facebook as it belongs to Facebook corporation. Or you make an account
with email/telephone.
Like with Facebook where I recomend you create a Page to do online activism seperate from your personal
facebook account, in Instagram, if you want to have a personal account for your own lifestyle needs , it is
good idea to also seperate it. Instagram allows you to have multiples accounts. I will not get into
technical details about that, but it is possible and not illegal. One account can be your personal, where you
post your lifestyle, and the other political about a topic you care passionaltely about and you want to raise
awareness for.
If you dont have instagram yet, you then maybe do not neet to operate two accounts there. Just make one
and start posting photos or short video of the topic that you want to raise awareness about.
Like in twitter, you use hashtags with # and you can even find popular ones if you type slowly like #a…. ,
instagram will automatically show you the most popular used topic depending on how many posts used that
hashtag.
For example ‘ #picoftheday is a VERY popular hashtag people tend to abuse to raise their chances to be
seen by other instagramers. Regardness of what is the image about they posted.
Also keep in mind instagram is mainly used by younger people than twitter and facebook. I could paste here
statistics but you can research it yourself if you dont believe me.
Facebook and Twitter are used by all ages, but mostly by professionals and families when Instagram is used
heavily by teenagers and young students in college and because these make the clients of movies, it is also
used by almost all actors and famous people who want a following online. For a hollywood star having an
account in Instagram has more sense than Twitter. And Instagram is less political than Twitter or Facebook.
But lnstagram too can be used to raise awareness about a problem and surely even younger people can be
engaged. Lets take an example.
Your local municipality decided with a private contractor to raise down a forest patch to make a private luxury
spa. A luxury spa is something that sits well with young users of instagram that manly post about luxury and
lifestyle. So you can ‘’hack’’ the system in a way. You will be speaking about luxury , but in a different way:)
Young ppl wil be attracted by photos of beautiful pictures of pools and spas (again make sure you have
rights to upload the pictures, ideally they are your picture taken with your own camera, and if they are
indoors of a business premisses, you may still have legal issues).
You dont want the luxury spa to replance a big patch of oxygen-producing trees in your town. You believe
this is wrong.
You can take photos of the trees before they are cut and AFTER they are cut. Create with an image program
in your smartphone or computer multiphoto pictures where you combine ‘’before’’ and ‘’after’’. Before cutting
them down and after. How does this look? Surely horrible. See example in next page.
This is what a youtuber called Jonna Jinton did very well,(her pictures of nature in Sweden were taken by
IKEA to produce posters for homes), search youtube for the video:
SORROW AND A HEAVY HEART | VLOG 14
You can go ahead to the part of the video where she shows in video how it was before and after the trees
where cut down. That part of the video starts at: 30 minutes after the video starts.
As you can see, same tecnique you can use in Instagram (in fact also in twitter or facebook).
Use your own pictures and videos to avoid legal problems with photos you dont own copyright. Or search for
photos that do not have copyright or the maker of the photo allows ‘’non-commercial use’’ (provided you do
not make money from your online volunteering/awareness campaigning using Social Networks).
Jonna Jinton regularly posts videos from North Sweden and speaks about creativity but in those video that
have SEEMINGLY nothing to do with ecology and the need to save the natural forest she imbueds her
content with videos about destruction. She could start actually a seperate youtube channel with videos only
showing destruction but that would not be very happy to watch. In a way, its best to share both happy
content and unhappy content. I will take about youtube as campaigning ground at the end of this pdf.
Now back in Instagram, you can focus your account with pictures , ideally ones you took yourself, and show
the destruction of the area, and essentially what you will be doing is journalism, photo-journalism. So you
should be a bit careful not to come across as aggressive. State the facts only, like ‘’today they cut 30 more
trees’’ and dont go into judgement that could put you into trouble ‘’these morons who dont respect anything’’.
I see this out of experience. I took photos of a pet shop from outside only. The photos showed a lizard
permanently in a glass cage half dead, and a primate capuchin monkey encased in a cage always (I was
there all day to see when and if they ever take out the capuchin but they did not). The capuchin primate and
the lizard, both half dead depressed and abused, and imprisoned permanently were FOR SALE in this
petshop.
I took photos only from outside standing on the street. I created a blog and uploaded the photos and shared
the blog link to online fora and facebook groups that relate to animal rights in my own country and city. Soon
the word got out to the very owner of the pet shop and he sent me a threatening text saying he will sue me
for taking photos of his business premises. Thankfully I was backed by my country’s animal rights
associations and they answer back to him, and so I was saved but the problem is, if you are going to do
citizen-journalist or online activism, you should spend 1-2 days reading about what is legal and what is not
legal regarding taking photography of your own and sharing it online.
So you open your instagram and you decided to really focus on showing pictures as many as possible about
the destruction being carried at the site where they bring down treets to create a luxury spa. You can take
photos from a distance using a zoom camera (safer than going inside the working site). You can be sure if
they spot you they may get aggressive to you and use legal language. If you can afford a lawyer, certainly
get one for advice. Or read online what is the law in your country about photos from a contruction site.
Like in twitter or facebook, engage with other people content to start a conversation and soon they will like
your content too Find accounts in instagram that also talk about destruction of natural sites and leave
comments. Ask them to see what you put up in your account. Soon you will have ppl hitting like on your
photos or short video and writing maybe comments to you.
You may be tempted to share 100 photos in one day but that is spam and the instagram has algorythms that
detect this activity as spam and your account could be deactivated (same for twitter and facebook by the
way). So you want to share 5 twits/day maximum, or 5 posts per day maximum in facebook, and 5 in
instagram, but the key here, according to experts in social media marekting, to share DAILY and FRESH
CONTENT.
Fresh content is photos and text never seen before online:)
Like the photo of your cat today eating her breakfast, if you share that, Google, Facebook, twitter and
instagram algorythmic set ups ‘’LOVE’’ your photo just cause it is ‘’fresh material’’, not shared before.
7) How much content and how often to share for maximum impact?
Experts say you should share content DAILY.
For at least 1 year !
and never completely ambadon the effort because your content will be seen as something like ‘old new’ and
Google/Social media will ‘’forget it’’. You can slack and post 3 times/week after 1 year of intense posting, but
never really completely abandon your campaign. After all, a social or ecology issue doesnt ‘’end’’ even if its
local. In the example above, after the trees are cut and the construction for the spa is built, you can start
posting photos you didnt post before and remind people what it used to be there, a forest instead of a
contruction. You can do that for years.
Try to blog /twit / instagram / facebook for minimum a year DAILY. And if possible with 5 (maximum) posts
per day.
8) Youtube for raising awareness? How hard is it? What tools I
need?
Like the Swedish woman in the example above, you can also harness the huge power of videomaking to
promote a topic that you care for (and here I mainly talk about non-commercial topics, like destruction of
nature, human rights, animal rights etc).
Your videos dont have to be perfect, but you should invest in a tripod and a good camera. A smartphone is
ok if you have a pod stick (thats the very basic and cheap equipment) but if you are serious about this you
should buy a compact camera with zoom of 20-50 so that you can take photos from afar and stay out of
trouble, and a tripod to avoid shakes in the photos.
After you have your equipment of choice, decide how you will raise awareness. The swedish youtube Jonna
Jinnton is pasting videos of nature and sometimes talk about the bad aspect of live in nature when big
companies decide to take massive ammounts of trees down.
In my humble opinion only showing destruction is not attracting people’s continued attention and not
convincing people much. You have to show why people should care.
If you are just a citizen who is concerned, just state this so that people dont expect professional smooth
video content. Your argumentw ill still be an argument if you show what is going on.
For example, short videos showing homeless ppl sleeping outside beautiful museums is a juxtaposition that
will interest people to see because of the misery presented in front of the beauty of a museum building.
Urban decay and homelessness and such video will potray the truth about your city. In most places the
official tourist guide do not say anything bad about a city or country. Your youtube can show the real face of
our city and how these homeless individuals ended up like this. I tried myself sometimes and found it they
rarely talk or trust me, they just want money or food. Its good to gain their trust first than directly ask them to
talk on camera. Many will ask that you put a fog on the face (this is possible in editing in youtube studio !!!)
and also any car and any face shown on your youtube vids must be hidden with a fog when you edit the
video inside ‘’Youtube studio’’.
VIdeo production is far more costly and TIME CONSUMING thatn instagram photos, twitter text and
facebook texts so this is for someone who likes video-editing and possibly has a strong video editing
machine cause many old computer cannot really deal with video-editing software.
If you have the good computer, the software to edit video to create a narrative maybe, and the camera/tripod,
what remains is to see what you wil be posting to reaise awareness for a problem in society. This is
dangerous ground cause photos of minors (children) can land you in jail (in most countries you cannot take
photos of children) and you can only take photos of people in PUBLIC SPACES (the streets) never indoors in
shops etc. And stil you are better off legally if you also spend time to cover their face and car plates with a
fog in Youtube studio or a software in your computer setup.
In youtube as in twitter you use hashtags and a text to describe the video and even keywords. When you
upload the video you are required to add all these elements as description of what is this video about. This is
where you have to really spend the time to fill all that info up, and dont just post a video. Your chances to
attract audience to your video HIGHLY IS INHANCED by using #hashtags, long textual presections on each
every video, and even the video itself, should have a voice narration explaining the problems. Everything
counts and as always the fresher the content (content never seen before online) the better chances to attract
audience.
9) Is blogging helping raise awareness?
Blogger.com / Wordpress.com (free) /Wordpress.org (paid service) helps a lot, when you write fresh texts
and share fresh content (photos you took yourself), because google algorythms automatically ‘’like’’ and
promote such fresh content.
The more often you blog the best. And the more you use keywords (the words you think people are
searching more in Google).
On way to find keyword is this:
Automatic google word complete to be set on ‘on’ in your google search engine setup.
This way when you are writing an article on green energy, and you write on a google search engine page
‘’green’’ Google automatically gives you keywords most people use to use in your own blog and thus do
‘’organic search engine optimization’’ for your blogging efforts.
The YELLOW phases below are nice ‘strings’’ (words together people use often in Google) to use in your
text in your blog and raise your chances of Google ‘’liking’ your blog and raising its position in google resutls
when someone search for the topic of your blog post, eg ‘’Green Energy Companies in EU’’.
Because I am Greek google gives me Greek (regional) suggestions/popular searches. I can open my Google
settings and remove regional results or open an ‘’incognito’’ search window in my browser to avoid getting
region-related results, UNLESS MY BLOG IS ABOUT MY REGION, in which case I want regional popular
pharses and words suggested by Google-autocomplete.
In the above image you see in yellow some phrases (strings) I can use in my blog if I am writing a topic
around Green energy companies and entrepreneurship. Giving that title to my blog post alone will raise my
organic search engine optimization (SEO) significantly! And then use these words often (but not more than
5-6 times, or else Google will think its spam) in my text below my title.
The title should always include the most popular keywords people are searching for your topic. You find them
out with Google Autocomplete :) (there are other more complex way but this is the easiest and fastest).
I hope this guide has helped. If you have qeustions email me at [email protected] with specific
questions only please about how to improve your social media campaigning efforts. If I can reply I will reply,
if I dont, it means I don’t know the answer.
Also you can participate for free (if you have economic hurdles its free) in this very
nice coursera open course:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/social-media-marketing
THE END.
