Social media is a powerful tool for spreading awareness and increasing enthusiasm for your cause. Now, more than ever, we are seeing the powerful impact this platform is having on our society. If you are not optimizing your social media strategy to take advantage of this, you are missing out on an efficient and cost-effective way to spread awareness for your nonprofit. While it’s standard for most companies and organizations to have a Facebook page or Twitter account, it’s more important to develop a strategy, define your goals, and implement a plan to get the most out of your online presence. Use these tips below to start increasing the effectiveness of your group today.
Develop a Plan
Though social media platforms are free to set up and use, it can be a waste of your time and manpower to post without a specific plan in place. A common mistake nonprofits make is setting up several accounts across different platforms, and then posting sporadically and not making the most of any of them. It’s better to pare down and focus on developing your presence on fewer networks, rather than doing the minimum on all of them.
The first step in developing a social media strategy is to identify your target audience. It can seem counterintuitive, but the more specific you are when imagining who exactly you are trying to reach, the more effective your posts will be. Many companies and nonprofits develop personas, or sketches of your ideal audience that makes it easier to create content. Writers can create detailed backgrounds, pain points, and demographic information for various personas to allow them to focus their content. In the case of nonprofits, identifying your personas can also help you decide what you want from your audience. For example, are your post designed to get donations, find volunteers, or increase awareness? Perhaps you have different goals for your different personas. Creating these personas with as much information as possible is vital to posting the content that will get you results.
Once your plan is in place, using analytics to determine its success will help you make changes when necessary or increase the types of post that are working. Many systems have free analytics tools that are relatively intuitive. It’s also easy to find videos or articles with advice on how to read your analytics. If you aren’t constantly evaluating and adapting your strategy, you are missing out on valuable information that can help your nonprofit immensely.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help
It can seem that every organization on social media has a team of trained marketing experts behind their brand. However, there is a lot of free information about how to develop your accounts, and it’s not as intimidating as it sounds. SEO optimization is a tool that companies and organizations use to increase their site visits and Google search positions, but it’s something that you can utilize to by just doing a little research. Many articles and blog posts on can give a great overview of how to integrate social media and SEO.
Another simple way to get feedback or ideas for your social media platforms is to simply ask your audience what they would like to see. Videos from events? Articles about current legislation related to your cause? Stories about the impact of your nonprofit? You can get a lot of information as well as increasing engagement by posting these questions to your platforms.
Emphasize Emotion
People will remember, respond to, and share posts that affect them on an emotional level. Personal stories or videos and pictures can evoke more emotion that words alone. Instead of links to your site and brief pieces of information, determine how you can increase the humanity in your online presence. You can do this by using a more conversational tone in your posts, or even better, the tone that your personas would use. Another way to make your posts more personal is to avoid jamming too much information in every single tweet or status update. When your feed reads too much like a constant advertisement for your organization, people will lose interest. You can find more information about increasing engagement in articles like this. This will help your organization stand out and make a lasting impact on your audience.
Have more questions about social media strategy for nonprofits? Post to the comments below, or reach out to us here: http://www.simplynonprofits.com/contact-us/. We would love to hear how these tips worked for your organization!