Social media for the Alternative
Posted in Resources on February 14, 2011
Social media is already playing a big role in mobilising for the March for the Alternative on 26 March. As unions reach out to their members through newsletters, emails and local meetings, supporters are also sharing news of the march with their own friends, families and colleagues online.
Many recent protests have been built using social media contacts, with a new wave of invitations going out every time someone signs up to come and tells their own friends. People might be cautious about coming along to an unfamilar event (and we’re hoping the march will attract many first time demonstrators) but if they see someone they know is going, it’ll give them much more confidence to come along themselves.
If everyone coming on the march were to tell their own social network contacts, we could make this huge. So please take a moment today to invite your own contacts, and help this thing to snowball.
Are you on Facebook? Sign up for our Facebook event page and share links in your own status updates.
Do you blog? You can get our Pledge widget to display marchers’ messages on your own site.
Are you on Twitter? Tweet about the march, using our hashtag #26March to join the conversation. We’re also tweeting at @march26march, so follow us if you want updates from the march.
If you Tweet or use Facebook, you’ve a choice of three Twibbons to decorate your avatar – from @unisontweets, @uniteyou and @michellelgraham (for the uninitiated, Twibbon.com lets you add a little badge to your profile picture, to help you identify others supporting the same cause and spread the word). Look out for these amongst people you’re following:
And if you’d rather use a larger profile picture to show your support, you’re welcome to take these:
For trade unionists, the union-specific social network, Unionbook.org also has its own event page for the march.
And for those who don’t use social media, you can help spread the word by good old-fashioned email. We’ve got a tool that helps scan the address books of certain email services (sorry it doesn’t have many of the services more popular in the UK!) and send a message to many people at once.
I would like to change my Facebook profile photo to an image publicsing the march. It is a great visible way of alerting friends to it and the more people who start doing it the more it encourages people to attend. Could you email around an image people can use for this?
This is what I did, it took 2 secs – right click on the logo that you want-click ‘save pic as’ and then save it on your PC in ‘my pictures’ – Open facebook and click add photo – upload it into your facebook by searching for it in ‘my pictures’ and then once uploaded go to pic and click ‘make profile pic’ Good Luck.