10 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits to Try in 2018
Running a nonprofit is difficult. You are on a limited budget and working under stressful conditions without proper visibility to help you gain more assistance in the task. Social media is a great tool to help bring about this visibility.
But how do you start being more successful with your nonprofit campaigns on social media? These tactics will help in the coming year to bring more awareness to your cause than ever before.
Don’t Wait For Them to Come to You
Social media is often ‘open’ these days, which gives you a great opportunity. You can monitor certain key-phrases as well as your nonprofit name, or just keep an eye on related pages and profiles.
Then visit audiences’ pages to comment and like on their public content, or just respond to them right in the thread. This type of direct engagement is among one of the most important ways that you can connect with your target audience.
Consistency Is Key
Ask any nonprofit out there what the number one crucial tactic they recommend is, and do you know what they will say? Consistency. Just plain old consistency is a big part of how they grow their network.
Successful nonprofits post several times a day, stay in contact one-on-one with loyal customers and are active in their campaigns. Isn’t that simple? If you post, they will come. Just keep your content high-quality.
Another helpful tool is to embrace time tracking software to monitor the team’s time and evaluate how you are including social management activities into your daily routine.
Cyfe is a great way to integrate time-tracking into your business routine. They support multiple productivity widgets, which you can add to your business dashboard to keep track of daily tasks and improve team efficiency.
Make Response Time a Priority
When you respond to people quickly, they usually notice. It is part of that engagement process, showing them that you care, that their opinion matters to you and that you are interested in communication with them just as they are with you.
It means making your social media campaign a big part of your overall marketing strategy, but most people would agree that it’s a good tactic anyway. This factor counts for both on-page activity and private messages into your overall response time.
Use tools like Salesmate to monitor your response time. The tool organizes your connections, saves contact info, shows important stats from your teams, etc.
Know Your Tone
If you don’t know how you want to sound to your audience, how can you properly connect with them? For that matter, how can you tell the story of your cause (storytelling should be a big part of your goal) when you don’t have a tone in place?
Be clear on what you want to be: serious, empathetic, funny, casual, professional? If you can nail down that voice, it’ll be easier to craft content. Think of it as a blueprint for your social media efforts.
Get People Invested In The Cause
Speaking of storytelling, did you know that by telling a story, you can get a lot of potential customers invested in your cause? It is all about connecting on an emotional level in a way that breaks through all the noise around us and gets people to focus on what you are trying to say.
There are so many ways to do this but none are as effective as being visually pleasing. Don’t tell them, show them. Let individuals in ‘the know’ of the nonprofit work. Simply creating an effective social media banner or interviewing individual people your company has helped in your cause is just a few of the many ways to start.
Show Them Where Their Money Goes
People who do contribute, want to know that their money is going. It’s important to be transparent. Constantly update nonprofit metrics on social media that link to a page on your website, showing donators how exactly they have helped. Measure your social media marketing ROI and make transparency key.
Try and break it down into something that is more tangible than overall efforts. For instance, if every dollar buys twenty bowls of rice, show that. If every sponsored click helps one child get a pair of shoes, show that.
Explain Difficult Concepts More Simply
Let’s say you are a nonprofit working to build clean wells in African villages. This task is much harder because of local political corruption, terrorism and problems with infrastructure.
This is difficult for donators to understand if they are
- 1) not familiar with the region, and
- 2) haven’t been there firsthand to understand anything beyond the basic facts
So break it down for your social users so they can engage in the discussion and begin to share by word-of-mouth.
Never Forget The Call To Action
Did you know that just by adding a CTA to your Facebook page and posts you can increase your clicks by up to 285%? That is quite a figure and it shows you just how critical it is to direct your users to important issues on your brand’s behalf.
Do you want them to share a post? Comment on an issue? Visit your page? Donate their money or time? Then you have to ask! This will have a profound impact on your social media efforts, which only means good things for your cause.
Don’t Forget The B2B
It isn’t just donors you should be thinking about with your social outreach. You can get in touch with businesses, other nonprofits and even influencers that can really boost visibility and raise donations.
They are always on the lookout for opportunities themselves, and if you can make them aware of your cause, this reaps benefits. So start sending out those feelers and try to make some connections!
Make The Experience More Personal
If you really want to get people involved, you have to make things personal. Record interviews with people to make an impact (give names, information, their backstory).
Let users make a personal, emotional connection. That is how you get them invested on more than a superficial level and improve interactions across the board.
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