Social media may be the main way you reach out to potential participants in the survey or a supplement to efforts supported by schools or sponsoring organizations. In either case, it is a powerful tool when used to full effect.

Preparing a plan in advance avoids scrambling to come up with content at the last minute. You can also share with partner organizations a social media toolkit that includes a variety of prepared messages, relevant tags, images and suggested posting dates, geared to strategic social media platforms to reach youth and in relevant languages. You can also consider social media “events” such as youth Instagram “takeovers” and “Twitterthons.” If you have the budget, consider paid social media ads focused on young people and parents in your area. 

To ensure young people are helping inform or develop content, choosing platforms and participating as messengers, consider a youth consultation and ideation session, such as the pre-survey Youth Lab, and secure Youth Animators as described in this toolkit. To protect young people from online harassment, they may prefer to share organizational posts rather than create their own.

The most important factor in a successful campaign is posting consistently and frequently. Ideally you should have material going out once a day during the open survey period. That content can vary but should have a consistent look and feel. 

Core social media assets could include:

• Links and handles 
• Graphic files: logos, taglines, images, animations and videos 
• Samples of posts for different platforms
• Social media cards and frames 
• QR code 

Consider content options such as:

1. Updates about how the campaign is progressing, for example: 
1. The survey site is now open at mycommunitysurvey.com.
2. Celebrating 150 surveys completed in the first week!  
3. Only three more days to make sure your voice is heard.
2. Interesting facts from the Canadian Index of Child and Youth Well-being. This approach provides you with a virtually endless supply of content. It has the advantages of previewing the kinds of questions that will be asked on the survey and encouraging a quick sharing of facts with parents and peers.
3. User-generated content. You can ask people to post their own short videos or still photographs with a tagline, perhaps incentivized by a prize.
4. Quotes from various influential sources about the importance of focusing on youth in public planning.
5. Posts by community leaders with influential voices and large networks (such as the local chief public health officer or the mayor).
6. Links to videos. 
7. Memes or photos that are interesting in themselves but can also be tagged with something relevant to the survey. Each of the dimensions could be highlighted successively, for example, “Number 7: Are we free to play?” overlaying an attention-getting photo of a skateboarder upside-down in the air.
8. You could share questions from the survey itself, with the ability to vote and see results in real-time. You might also share current response trends, such as “So far, the majority of youth are telling us that public transit is accessible in our community – have your say at ourcommunity.com.”
9. Short video clips can be produced by social media users. For example, a young person might find a creative way to say why they completed the survey.

See Appendix for sample prize draw ballot.

Video

If your budget and timeline allow, video is a great way to have youth talk directly to their peers about why they should get involved, and it can be shared at events or though media (particularly social media). Animated graphics, like sped-up hand-drawing, are also a great way to present key data and show the relationship between variables. Using text instead of a speaker can help create versions for different languages and age groups. 

If you are going to drive social media users to a video, keep it short. Multiple short videos can be more effective than one longer one. This approach gives you the opportunity to release them separately for greater effect and factors in the shorter attention spans we all have in these digital times.

Many young people have the tools and skills to put together effective videos quickly and at practically no cost. Both Instagram and Facebook can link to YouTube. A YouTube channel is free and keeps all your video content in one place. TikTok is another video platform, but content created there only lasts for a short while and must be refreshed regularly. However, social media platforms are always evolving and young people frequently migrate to new ones, so the importance of youth participation in video creation and sharing, like in every other aspect of the survey, is key. A good safeguarding practice is to review with youth the optimal privacy protection options for the social media platforms that are used. 

You are really only limited by your imagination. The goal is to generate a buzz of energy before and during the period you are conducting the survey. Your key messages should direct the viewer to the place (i.e., a website or YouTube video) that provides more information about why and how to get involved. The path to fill out the survey should be as short as possible, while still making the route interesting enough to want to follow. This will provide you with better results (by ensuring more people participate), but it will also prompt conversations about the topics being discussed and build a sense of anticipation that the results will be acted on. This “buzz” is something you can measure in real time using basic analytics software that tracks views, forwards, etc. Measuring engagement can help you decide how to target or amplify your efforts if survey responses are at a lower level than you intended.