Photo Credit: Olivia Blinn/IRC
It is important to decide what social media platforms suit your country's context to optimize your capacities and best serve the audience's needs.
Explore Your Audience & Objectives
The first step in defining social media platforms is understanding your audience and considering the objectives of your Signpost program. Consider these examples & the chart below:
- If you aim to share actionable information that helps refugees and other vulnerable communities make decision, Facebook is going to be best for you.
- Apart from sharing actionable information in Facebook, If you also want to share information with planners and policymakers, build a network, and encourage your audience to take action then Twitter (X) and LinkedIna are good choice for you.
- If you want to focus more on photos and audiovisuals, then Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube are best for you.
Analyze What Channels Are Mostly Used in Your Country
To complete an analysis, consider the following approaches:
| Approach #1 | Approach #2 | Approach #3 |
|
A desk review can help you to understand what social media platforms are the most used in your context. |
We Are Social releases annual reports on mobile phone, internet, and social media use in many countries. |
Datareportal allows you to search reports from all regions of the world. |
Complete an Information Need Assessment (INA)
An Information Needs Assessment (INA) tells you what communication channels are most preferred by your audience.
- For information on how to complete an INA click here.
- To view previous Signpost INAs click here.
- In addition to INAs, you can also take a look at an Information Ecosystem Analysis (IEA). View some by Internews here.
If you already conducted an INA, you are one step ahead in defining the social media platforms best suited for your audience and context.
Listen to People Through Survey & Discussion
If you have not conducted INA, you can still listen to your audience by conducting your own survey, arranging group discussions, and directly talking to the audience you want to serve.
Operational Considerations
Finally, there are a few important operational factors to consider when selecting channels.
- Although most digital communication channels are supported by Zendesk, there are a few that are not. If you use a channel that is not supported by Zendesk, (for example Tiktok), that means you will have to check Tiktok on a daily basis/ several times in a working day in order to ensure that you are responding to messages that are coming into that channel.
- Not every channel is integrated into the Signpost Analytics Hub, which is where data from Signpost programs is analyzed and presented automatically. If you use a channel that is not integrated into the Signpost Analytics Hub, this may pose complications in calculating the number of people using your Signpost service, as well as other key metrics. You can reach out to the Signpost Measurement Officer to explore alternative approaches.
- Different social media channels are geared to different content formats (eg. video, audio, images), and it is generally difficult to build an audience in a given social media channel if you are not regularly creating quality content in the formats that that channel is geared towards. Therefore, it’s important to assess your team’s capacity to regularly create quality content in the main formats of any channel you are considering using. For example, you should probably not open up a YouTube channel if you don’t have anyone on your team with video editing skills.
See the table below for a breakdown of these three operational considerations by channel:
| Communications Channel | Supported in Zendesk? | Can it be Integrated into the Dashboard? | Content Format |
| Yes | Yes | Text, Video, Image Live streaming | |
| Facebook Messenger | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Audio, Documents |
| Yes | Yes | Image, Video, Reels, Stories, IGTV | |
| Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Audio, Documents | |
| YouTube | Yes | Pending (in future) | Video, Short Video (Shorts) |
| TikTok | No | Pending (in future) | Short videos |
| Telegram | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Audio, Documents |
| Viber | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Videos, Audio, Documents |
| IMO | No | No | Text, Image, Video, Audio, Document |
| Yes | Yes | Text, Video, Image, Articles | |
| X (Twitter) | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Poll |
| We Chat | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Audio, Documents, |
| Snapchat | No | No | Image, Video, Stories |
| Line | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Videos, Audio, Polls |
| Slack | Yes | Yes | Text, Image, Video, Document |