How Not For Profits Can Use Social Media

14 Ways Charities Can Use Facebook

 Facebook offers not for profits an easy to use and low cost opportunity to provide a digital meeting place for your supporters, staff and clients. Through your page they can swap information, ideas, images, vision and sound on almost any subject.  And Facebook’s feed-in feature automatically provides information updates to people following the page.

14 common ways to use Facebook to promote your issue are:

• Allowing people to make on-line donations. 
• Encouraging people to follow you by linking with your other social media platforms. 
• Coaching visitors on lobbying business or politicians on your issue. 
• Linking to media releases and news reports. 
• Marketing your courses or products. 
• Polling supporters about your issue. 
• Posting general and area-specific status updates on your organisation. 
• Profiling the work of inspirational staff or volunteers. 
• Promoting an information session, rally or event. 
• Reporting the progress you are making on a cause or what influential organizations or individuals think about your issue. 
• Running a competition so users can create content for your cause. 
• Sharing educational content through words, images, video or case studies. 
• Thanking supporters and donors for their involvement. 
• Using case studies that show your services helping others.

You need to actively market your Facebook page within and beyond you organization so people know about it.  Simple ways to do this include:

• Ask users and potential users to spread your information. 
• Add an icon to your webpage to connect people directly with your Facebook page. 
• Askg users to link their websites to your page. 
• Include your Facebook URL in emails, media releases, in advertising and in print. 
• Use Facebook ads to draw particular demographics or communities of interest to your page.

Science Of Twitter and Facebook Updates

Last week the US PR podcast "On The Record" interviewed Dan Zarrella of Hubspot about the science of timing Facebook and Twitter updates. 

Zarrella has studied when people are most effective on these platforms by drawing on data from two years of quantitative research.Although his material mostly covers US data, it reveals interesting insights, particularly about Twitter.  It seems:

•You stand a better chance of getting your content retweeted, if you tweet later in the day or on a Friday.

•To get click throughs, Thursday and Friday are popular days to sprinkle links in your tweets. 

•When tweeting your own content, it's OK to tweet the same information multiple times. For example tweet once in the morning, in the afternoon and then again in the evening. This exposes your message to the greatest number of people, many of whom may miss your original tweet. However the trick is to change the wording of each tweet over the course of the day so, although information is the same, each post appears slightly different.

Zarrella's Facebook insights are also interesting:

•Avoid posting too often to Facebook because feeds tend to stay around a lot longer on this platform than Twitter and you can annoy people by updating too frequently. Twitter users tend to have more followers than Facebook friends so Facebook posts come through an account at a slower rate and are visible longer. 

•People who post once every other day seem to attract more friends. 

•When brands publish on weekends they tend to get more "likes" because apparently there is less competition from other brands as business updates slow over the weekend. 

•Videos tend to work much better on Facebook because they are easier to watch than on Twitter. 

It would be interesting to see Australian stats on the how's and when's of engaging others on-line.

Credit to Eric Schwartzman and Dan Zarrella.