Social Media: A Force for Good
In these unprecedented times and this extraordinary year of 2020, I certainly have found myself often exasperated at some of the content that has rolled through my news feeds. At times I've really questioned whether I want to stay engaged with the various platforms and then I stop, check myself and remember the good. The fact that for the last 15 years Facebook alone has kept me in contact with friends and family all around the globe that, were it not to exist, I would have no doubt lost touch with by now. Sure, I might have sent the odd email, perhaps even a phone call here and there, and yes had I found myself in the vicinity of an old friend, I would have looked them up. But Facebook has allowed for me to stay truly connected with their lives, at the very least month in month out, and in the spirit of glass half full I intend to hold on to that.
Lusio's New Friend
Over the last couple of months, we at Lusio HQ have made a new friend through Facebook by the name of Zachary Weeks. Zachary has maintained faith in social media's potential to be a force for good throughout his career, with some tremendous results.
Hailing from Canada, Zachary, who also has Cerebral Palsy and uses a wheelchair full-time, has nearly a decade of professional experience in communications and social media marketing. He is currently social media manger for a large not for profit in Canada and has a ‘side hustle’, as he likes to call it, of his own called Cerebral Marketing, a social media marketing agency he runs from his home town, Edmonton.
Cerebral Palsy Worldwide
Zachary has known about and understood the potential of social networking sites since early in his career. While still a career rookie, he decided to try and leverage this technology by starting a Facebook group for people with Cerebral Palsy – Cerebral Palsy Worldwide. The purpose of the group would be to connect people with CP around the world – simple. When I spoke to him last, he candidly told me that after setting the group up he kind of ‘forgot about it for a while’. He didn’t tell me how long a while was, but he did tell me that he was ‘blown away’ when he eventually did get back to check in on it. Simply put, things organically took off and the group had quietly, in the background, developed a life of its own.
Taking up the reins once more of administration, he has since guided it to where it is today. That is to say, over 7000 members from around the world who share their lived experience, advances in technology and plenty of other resources, day in day out one the biggest social media platform of them all. Lusio Rehab has been in the group for the last little while and I always notice considerable activity, so I asked Zachary if he had some stats on how much activity. At the time of our chat, the group had had 337 posts involving 4935 members engaging in the last 28 days. Anyone in the business of running social media pages and accounts will appreciate that those are pretty impressive engagement stats.
Join Zachary's Community
Zachary has used the potential for Facebook to be a force for good to build an incredible community. With that many active members you have to believe that the Cerebral Palsy Worldwide Facebook group is having a wonderfully positive impact in members’ lives. Fantastic job Zachary!
If you aren’t already a member of Cerebral Palsy Worldwide, then hurry along there now and hit the join button though the link here. Zachary will be happy to welcome you all, and through both it and Lusio we will be seeing plenty more of him we hope over the coming weeks. We are working on a few things which can utilise his expertise and we really hope that he will become our man on the ground in Canada.
