Lessons learned from communicating with young people in Scotland during the pandemic

2021

Lessons learned from communicating with young people in Scotland during the pandemic

We are Young Scot - the national youth information and citizenship charity for 11-26-year olds in Scotland. We worked hard in 2020 to give young people the information they needed in a way that was tailored to their needs. As we move into a new phase of the pandemic, we’re keen to share some of the lessons we learned.  

Understand your audience – throughout 2020, we made sure that our social media content and digital information responded to young people’s ever-changing needs. We gathered feedback in various ways, including our digital information review group, surveys, analytics, and social media feedback. These insights helped us to refine further how we create content.

Balance is important – young people want to be informed, but it’s crucial to share fun content too – to avoid news fatigue. Frequent updates are hard to keep up with – so to make them more appealing, we used Instagram Polls, quizzes, memes and more. We also took part in the latest trends on TikTok to be both informative and fun. Some of our most successful TikTok content was our Gaelic language content. It worked well as we encouraged young people to duet with us and left comments in both English and Gaelic. 

Keeping young people’s attention – social media platforms are designed to keep you on the platform; therefore, users tend to want to stay there. So, it’s essential to consider when it’s best to signpost young people to other places, for example, a website. We use our website for more in-depth information and use social media to cover the key points. It’s important to break up the content when writing for the web, through headings and bullet points and using video, GIFs or images. During 2020, we found YouTube and Facebook to be the most successful places for video and Instagram Stories over IGTV.

Young people want to see others like them - feedback from young people on our #AyeFeel Like Talking series was that they wanted to see other young people like themselves in the content and videos! They also told us that they don’t want organisations to use a style of language that ‘pretends’ to be a young person. 

Looking ahead to 2021 – this year, we a’re continuing to focus on getting as much feedback as possible from young people – and using this to refine our information output. We are also trialling new ways to communicate information – such as podcasts and Instagram Guides. We are committed to continually learning and using insights to tailor our work to make sure young people have the information they need when they need it, and on the platforms they choose.  

You can follow Young Scot on TikTok here to keep up to date with our latest content campaigns for young people.