Introduction
‘Sponsor a Gambian Girl’ foundation strives to fulfil its mission through two goals. The first one is linking schoolgirls in The Gambia with sponsors. The second goal is to raise awareness about the difficult situation of the Gambian girls and gain charity champions who would help the SaGG mission reach a new wider audience and increase the incentive to provide support. The foundation uses digital marketing tools and practices to grow its online presence and awareness.
Social media presence
The SaGG’s presence in the digital world consists of its website and social media profiles. The foundation in question has its profiles on the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. The largest number of users follows the Facebook account (about 3000 followers), the second place in terms of audience size has an Instagram profile (about 1662 followers), then LinkedIn (526 followers) and Twitter (167 followers). All the social media pages mentioned link to the foundation website and introduce viewers to the SaGG with a short description located in the bio. The Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles have a unified cover which is the foundation logo. Twitter page cover differs from the ones on other platforms but also refers to the website. Additionally, the foundation has a YouTube channel, however, unlike the other social media profiles, it is not linked to the SaGG website, which might be one of the reasons for its poor popularity of only 8 subscribers. Content of the SaGG social media posts is mostly informational, concerning either the situation in the Gambia (mostly focusing on gender inequalities and problems with education) or referring to the foundation activity, often telling a story of specific cases of its charges. Posts appear fairly regularly, sometimes there are few posts a day, another time there is a week gap between posts, but generally, content is published every 2 or 3 days. Content usually takes the form of written posts supplemented with pictures or short videos. The short video format comes up quite often but it is mostly around a 5-second length motion graphic with no sound, therefore it is not highly engaging. Additionally, the majority of content is posted without any changes throughout all social media platforms and occasionally original content is interspersed with reposts from other users’ profiles.
Social media voice
Content is generally the same on all platforms, therefore social voice is very stable. The social voice of the SaGG foundation can be described as friendly, due to the difficulties the Gambian girls face it is rather serious and as an organization relining on trust it leans toward a formal voice. Examples of hashtags often used by the foundation are #genderequality #breakthebias and #educategirls.
Social media audit
The lack of varied content tailored to different audiences and forms of posting on individual platforms reduces the potential for full involvement of users. Analyzing the last 10 posts the engagement rate was calculated as presented below:
According to the Hootsuite blog, a good engagement rate is between 1% to 5%. One may notice that the engagement rate from the highest to the lowest in chronological order on the following platforms is as follows: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. What is interesting is that Facebook which gathers the biggest audience has the smallest engagement rate and Twitter with the smallest audience brings in the highest engagement rate. This phenomenon might be explained by the facts also mentioned in the above linked Hootsuite blog, namely, the bigger the audience is, the harder it is to achieve a good engagement rate. Therefore Twitter is not necessarily the best platform to focus on for the SaGG foundation, especially in the further part of the report, one can find out that this platform is not the most popular among the foundation’s target market.
Qualitative research indicated that recently two types of posts stood out by obtaining engagement about 2 to 3 times higher than the average post. The first type of post was a repost which example can be seen below:
The high number of reactions under the reposted real-life story of a Gambian girl implies that this type of content might have potential that is yet untapped by the SaGG. The second type of post represents the SaGG champion advocating the foundation’s mission:
The audience
The primary target audience of the SaGG foundation is defined as women in the age range 21-40 years, students or educated to University, level pursuing a career as a manager. She is interested in gender equality, women in leadership, education, activism. Motivated by seeing women and girls overcoming challenges and women making a great stride in male-dominated sectors. Their pain points are discrimination, abuse, exploitation, violence, gender biases and stereotypes. The results of the social media audit indicate that the primary target audience has not been sufficiently engaged, therefore the foundation’s strategy should still focus on reaching it. According to data collected from Statista (appendix) to get the best results, the foundation should focus primarily on creating content for the lower age range of the target market, with the greatest emphasis on primary Instagram, then respectively Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Social trends
From among the 8 content marketing trends in 2022 listed by SemRush author selected the most important in the context of the foundation’s activity. The first two trends are focusing on ‘humanized’ content and empathy, research and storytelling. Another trend is ‘content audits take the centre stage’ and as this report implies, the foundation is already following this trend. As a vital element of a successful social media strategy, SemRush also lists video content, especially in short form. Research of topics related to the foundation’s activities, conducted with the use of the Google Trends tool, shows that topics related to the SaGG foundation activities such as: education in Africa, charity, volunteering, gender inequality, women in leadership, discrimination have currently high scores in terms of ‘interest over time’ all exceeding the threshold of 70 points.
Recommendations:
The research results mentioned above indicate that one of the key trends is moving toward video content. The reasons for that are numbers presented below (Dirwai, 2022):
- The average person spends 100 minutes watching videos per day
- Online videos are set to make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic
- 84% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video
- Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in the text
- Social videos get 12 times more shares than text and images combined
Drawing conclusions from the conducted audit of the SaGG foundation, the author would especially recommend developing video content. The foundation has a YouTube channel but it is very neglected and does not use all of its potential. Additionally, data acquired from Statista (appendix) shows that the SaGG foundation should reach its target audience through the TikTok platform, not only because of the video format used but also due to the gender distribution of users where women are the vast majority compared to other platforms (appendix). The author would recommend changing the usage of motion graphic format for using the above-mentioned perks of video format to create regular video content alternately presenting the foundation’s charges and its champions, as this content has the potential to engage the foundation’s audience more. The author believes that applying this strategy will be beneficial as the video format is proven to increase engagement and the content itself would be a form of testimony that can increase the conversion rate. The suggested KPIs would then be the engagement rate with the setup goal of increasing by 30% in 3 months from implementation of the new strategy and the conversion rate which is planned to increase in this same period would be 5%.
Video:
Appendix:
Acquired from Statista
