According to Hubspot, the main goals for nonprofits using social media are fundraising, generating brand awareness, recruiting volunteers, and sharing news:
Despite these great intentions, a majority of nonprofits miss out on the many opportunities social media marketing offers. According to the same HubSpot research, 67% of nonprofits have no social media strategy, policies or goals documented, and 53% of nonprofits are not measuring their social media.
Without an established social media strategy or any way to track success, many non-profit marketing teams are left to their own devices without the resources, support, and budget to allow them to succeed online.
Luckily, there are some effective social strategies specific to non-profits that are easy to execute. Here are 5 ways non-profit organizations can use social media to achieve their goals:
Create visually engaging content.
In an increasingly competitive digital world where high-quality visuals are becoming a standard expectation for most consumers, creating visually engaging content is a necessity for any business using social media as a marketing tool. Consumers are three times more likely to engage with Tweets that have photos and videos, and Facebook posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement compared to posts without a visual.
This is especially true if a goal of the non-profit’s social media strategy is to drive traffic to content hosted on their website. Sharing external links with infographics, GIFs,or high-quality photos that you have access to can greatly improve the click-through-rate of your posts. And if you don’t have access to high-quality visuals, there are plenty of free stock photo sites that can help. A few of my favourites are Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash.
2. Include strategic hashtags to increase your reach.
With social networks becoming increasingly pay-to-play, it’s important to give your organic content the best chance to succeed when advertising budgets are tight. One of the most cost-effective ways to increase your organic reach on social media is through strategic hashtags that can help get your messaging in front of the right audience.
All of the major social platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest—have their own search functionality, and with hashtags, allow top performing content to be shown to users that search for specific topics. You can add hashtags into your keyword strategy by creating your own branded hashtag and build a following around it, or by jumping into conversations around pre-existing popular hashtags. Some of my favourite hashtag research tools include Autohash, Hashtagify, Keyhole, and Trendsmap.
3. Encourage engagement and be responsive to your audience.
By posting on social media, nonprofits enter a world where potential donors or volunteers can get in touch directly and expect a prompt response. 85% of consumers on Facebook expect their questions to be answered within six hours, and 64% of users on Twitter expect to hear back within an hour. Facebook pages even highlight how quickly business pages respond to messages, establishing a clear expectation with the audience:
Social media offers nonprofits a unique opportunity (and challenge) to directly engage with their audience online if they’re able to stay on top of community management. Having a message that a non-profit responds within a few hours like the Little Warriors example above leaves a far better impression than one that responds within a few days or longer.
4. Make the donation process as clear and simple as possible.
When a goal of using social media is to generate donations, it’s critical to make it as easy as possible for your audience to do so. That includes making the donation process on your website as seamless as possible when driving traffic to the site with a goal of driving donations, but there are also tools that are available on social platforms to generate donations directly as well.
With 80% of nonprofits saying Facebook is their primary focus for social media, Facebook responded in kind by integrating with payment platforms to make the donation process seamless for non-profit Facebook pages. They’ve also covered all processing fees for all donations so the proceeds can go directly to the cause from Facebook.
5. Define clear success metrics and report on them regularly.
General goals are a great starting point for a social media strategy, but they’re useless if there aren’t clear, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that help define those goals and overall success online. With over half of marketers in nonprofit organizations struggling to measure the effectiveness of their social profiles, there’s a clear need for a consistent reporting strategy to help define success on social media.
Social platforms offer data to marketers through their own insight and analytics platforms, like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Pinterest Analytics. In tandem with using UTM parameters to connect links shared on social media with Google Analytics reports, these data sources can be used to provide an accurate picture of how effective a social media strategy is for any nonprofit looking to achieve their goals online.