It is highly recommended that you use social media and post your “personal eco-progress-story” to social media. The superpower of using social media is that you can easily reach many people in your network and multiply your wider impact with relatively limited effort. For some, this will be a change in behaviour that you might feel nervous about, however, it is well worth persisting. See the Community page for more on the benefits of using social media.
Sharing to social media does not need to take over your life or change your approach. Do it on your terms. To form the habit you need to regularly log on to your network and make a reasonably steady stream of posts at a rate you are comfortable with. It might be once per week or fortnight, or more frequently. However, frequently you do so, each time you post something it will extend your influence and make it more likely others will see and respond to what you post.
Choose to consider your efforts to increase your social media presence to be similarly important to your efforts to progress an EcoTracker Top Action, and approach these in a similar way e.g. by considering what you already do, making a personal commitment to improve this, making a plan of action, taking action, tracking your efforts and reflecting on your successes.
Consider starting by posting a few stories about general fun things that you are interested in or have done, so that you are not only posting your “personal eco-progress-story”. The easiest way to start could be sharing something that someone else has done or said, or an interesting news story. You could also start by commenting on or liking things that others post. By posting on a range of topics, you are more likely to gain interest from your network, which will mean you will then feature on people’s newsfeeds and have the opportunity to influence and engage them with your “personal eco-progress-story”.
Get into the habit of sharing: for instance, when you read something interesting or come across a top tip, your next step should be to share it.
Consider tagging people in your posts if you want to directly inform them of your post and / or reference something they have done. Also, consider using hashtags in your posts to connect your posts to wider conversations on social media. To add a hashtag, type # followed by an uninterrupted string of text without any spaces, punctuation or symbols e.g. #ecotracker.
Also, get into the habit of supportively responding to the posts from others with positive comments or likes. This is important for both those who have made much progress already (who can support those less experienced) and also those at an earlier stage in their journey (who can support and be supported by those at a similar stage and with similar goals). Consider challenging a friend to complete actions at the same time as you and then support each other to achieve your goals. It can be fun to introduce a competitive element and see who can get there first or find the most creative solutions.
Over time you will find what kinds of posts get the best reaction and engagement from your network, and you can focus more on those kinds of posts.
If you don’t have a social media account, the first step is to get one.
For those not familiar with sharing, you need to be logged into your social media account when you make a post or share a link. You can post directly from your social media account and you can add photos that are stored on your device and links for web pages. Alternatively, if you want to share a web page link, you may find social media sharing buttons on web pages that will automatically take you to the social media posting facility for your network and add in the link to that web page, speeding up the process. See example social media sharing buttons below for various social media or communication options, which could be used to directly share this web page.