RESOURCES
Alabama Care Social Media
There are approximately 32,000 children and 1.2 million adults with a disability in the state of Alabama, the home of Alabama Care.
There are approximately 7.2 million children and 61 million adults with a disability in the United States.
There are approximately 240 million children and one billion adults with a disability worldwide.
Although these individuals vastly differ in diagnoses, they share certain experiences that are universal within their community and need two things among many: connection to information and services that improve and make their lives easier and connection to a community of shared experience and understanding.
They want and need valuable information. They want to be seen, heard, validated, and understood. They want equity to exist in every scope of life and to increase awareness so that gaps in equity can be filled. They want and need to belong to a tribe of like-minded individuals who share the same life experiences and benefit from their interactions together.
What is the most effective and efficient way to reach the members of this vast community?
Through social media.
Our Mission
Our mission at Alabama Care is to serve the disability community in both ways, so earlier this year we added two social media initiatives – on Instagram and TikTok – to help us serve our disability community in a different way than previously.
Social media is a powerful means for serving and reaching out to this community on a state, national, and worldwide level. Social media is about community-building and connection and is a unique tool for rapid, widespread transmission of ideas and information that provides an avenue for organizations and individuals to specifically target those they believe will benefit most from certain connections and information.
Individuals with disabilities and the families of children with disabilities lead busy and complex lives, with limited mobility, limited opportunity to travel, and limited time in general. That’s why Alabama Care uses Instagram and TikTok to highlight the important, inspirational, and/or validating information in our long-form broadcasts. To this end, we publish two short video clips each week that either connect people with information or services that they need to make their lives better and easier or foster personal connection and validation through raising awareness of their shared experiences as disabled individuals.
We want to make it easy for our community to be directed to content that they will find valuable without making them invest a lot of their time to seek it out. If someone sees a clip that resonates with him or her, we provide direct links to the full broadcast it came from so the person can receive the additional benefit of easily accessing it through our YouTube Channel. The links are provided in our daily Instagram stories and are pinned on our Instagram profile page so that they will be permanently accessible. We also publish posts featuring motivating or informative quotes from our interview guests as well as other individuals or informational carousels that simplify and highlight the benefits of disability organizations and services.
What We Do
We publish promotional posts to make the disability community aware of our upcoming broadcast content and employ a hashtag strategy to expand our reach to individuals we believe can benefit from the content we provide.
At Alabama Care, we perceive our organization as being a microphone for the disability community and the organizations that serve it and recognize that social media is an integral part of the widespread communication and connection process.
Within the context of Alabama Care venturing further into becoming a disability media company, we feel it is important to offer social media management services to organizations and individuals within the disability community.
What Is Included
Services would include:
- specifically identifying the target audience and the problems that the individual’s or organization’s products or services would solve for that audience
- creating clear brand messaging for use across all social platforms and websites in use
Services would be available across all social media platforms and would include:
- video content creation and editing
- static posting
- captioning with the use of keywords based on the target audience
- a hashtag strategy to increase reach to new audiences
- follower interactions
- reaching out to similar creators for potential collaboration
- regular social media strategy evaluations to gauge content and posting effectiveness
If Alabama Care continues to be supported by grant funding in the future, it would give us the opportunity to provide social media services at a greatly reduced rate, thereby making them far more accessible to the disability community.