A well-organized social media toolkit is crucial when engaging influencers and celebrities to support your campaign across platforms. Like media kits, these easy-to-reference documents keep all the assets influencers need to support your campaign in one place. A great toolkit can also ensure accuracy, consistency, and trackability among campaign posts from public figures. After working on 100+ cause influence campaigns, I’ve learned that a well-put-together social media kit will get more influencers on board and attract your desired audiences.
In this guide, I’m sharing five steps for building a social media toolkit, plus a premade and customizable Social Media Toolkit Template, that you can utilize in your next cause influence, marketing, or advocacy campaign.
1. Share an Overview of Your Campaign
Following your cover (optional), the first slide of your social media toolkit should give a brief overview of your campaign so that influencers and their teams can easily understand your organization’s mission. Ensure you have the basic information, like your campaign name and start and end dates. Then, in less than 100 words, share a short, compelling case for why an influencer should support your campaign, addressing the following questions:
- Why is your campaign necessary?
- What does your campaign aim to achieve?
- How will your campaign make an impact?
Highlight social impact statistics in this slide that are relevant to your campaign. My free Social Media Toolkit Template gives visual examples of strategically using stats to grab influencer attention.
2. Provide Campaign Graphics, Post Copy, and Talking Points
After you’ve established the importance of your campaign, let influencers know how they can support it on social media by providing examples of what you want them to post. Use your social media toolkit to share premade campaign graphics, videos, hashtags, your organization’s handle, trackable links, and other relevant post details.
When asking influencers to post on behalf of your campaign, it’s always good to give them options. I suggest offering 4 to 5 different posts with varied writing styles and tones of voice. This variety will allow influencers to post in a way that aligns with their brand while still using your approved messaging.
3. Give Influencers Customizable Talking Points
Sometimes, you’ll give influencers the freedom to create more personalized campaign content, like a selfie video. If you decide to go this route, create a slide in your social media toolkit that provides 4-6 talking points based on your campaign’s key messages. These talking points will guide influencers’ content creation and help ensure message accuracy.
For tips on writing and organizing a slide of customizable talking points, reference my Social Media Toolkit Template.
Step 4: Make Your Posting Guidelines Clear
Whether influencers create custom content or share copy directly from your social media toolkit, they should still follow specific posting guidelines. This approach will help keep shared content cohesive and ensure posts include the necessary assets.
For example, on launch day, you may want every influencer who receives your social media toolkit to post about your campaign on Twitter with a link to your landing page. Providing a slide with clear posting guidelines will ensure influencers know this information.
My Social Media Toolkit Template provides even more examples of posting guidelines and demonstrates how to lay them out.
Step 5: Highlight Your Organization
Before closing with a thank you, create a slide in your social media toolkit that gives information about your organization. People often make the mistake of moving this slide further up in their social media toolkit, but, in my experience, it can detract from your core ask.
This slide is an opportunity to highlight who you are and the purpose behind your social impact work. Keep it simple by sharing a short version of your mission statement and information about the core programs relevant to your social impact campaign. Consider adding photos of your staff or volunteers to show your real-life impact.
Build a Social Media Toolkit Template that Grabs Influencers’ Attention
My new book, Good Influence: How to Engage Influencers for Purpose and Profit, shows you how to achieve great results without any prior Influencer connections. An organized and detailed social media toolkit helps. Providing campaign assets, customizable talking points, and clear post guidelines will allow influencers to share about your campaign on social media without guesswork.
Download my Social Media Toolkit Template and follow the steps I’ve laid out in this blog to create your own. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
This article was written by Paul Katz.
