Top 6 Social Media tips for nonprofits for June

Researching and sharing the best social media tips for nonprofits is one of my favourite things about writing here on the blog. With social media constantly evolving the number of strategies you can employ to build support and drive donor interaction is almost endless but as ever I recommend experimenting and then finding what works best for your organization. Above all, don’t try and publish daily content on every single social media platform that’s out there, unless you have a marketing team of a dozen people at your charity you just won’t have the time to do this effectively and ultimately some platforms will work better than others for your cause – so focus on the ones that provide the most interaction and best drive engagement.

Starting this month I’ll be sharing my favourite social media quick tips for nonprofits each month, a series of posts that share information that’s easy to understand and strategies that are quick to implement within your social media planning, part one follows:

Twitter: What’s the ideal length for a tweet to gain retweets?

If you ever wondered the important factors behind your content being retweeted have you considered  the length of your tweet? Turns out that it’s an important factor in improving the likelihood of a retweet and it makes sense when you see the data. As you all know many people tend to use close to the full length of their allowed 140 characters when posting a tweet but to retweet the user has to modify/delete/edit the original retweet to be able to share the information a second time, which means they might not bother. According to a recent study by Track Social right around 100 characters is perfect – fewer than 70 results in fewer retweets and more than 110 sees the odds diminish also.

Facebook: What’s the ideal length for Facebook posts?

From the same study comes the alarming news that the ideal length for having your Facebook updates shared, liked and visited is a remarkably brief 40-45 characters total. If there wasn’t research backing this up I’d be skeptical about such brevity but the message is clear – the shorter the better in terms of getting the post noticed or at least shorter posts than what you probably are doing at present. By way of comparison this sentence you’re reading has 68 characters.

LinkedIn/Twitter: Why don’t my tweets publish as LinkedIn updates any more?

If you’ve been using LinkedIn for more than two years you’ll remember you used to be able to automatically sync your tweets to LinkedIn. However since the two social media giants split in 2012 you can no longer automatically accomplish this. Unfortunately it’s now a manual process however the opposite can still be done! Any time you post an update to LinkedIn that you want your Twitter followers to also see, you can syndicate that update to Twitter by selecting the Public + Twitter option in the Share With dropdown and then click Share in the LinkedIn update composer.

Google+: How can I make my posts more visual on Google+?

One recent finding that I think is great is the ability to use formatting on Google+ posts. Having the option to make things bold, underlined, appear in italics or create a bullet list provides the options for posts on Google+ to have a visual appeal that you just can’t match on Facebook or elsewhere. In addition you can also add photos, videos, links to your posts simply by dragging them to your share box.  Rather than have you look up formatting option for your posts I’ve included a cheat sheet below for some of the most common options.

YouTube: How can I quickly extend my audience?

Video and especially YouTube remains a sometimes overlooked channel for content sharing via social media. Many organizations are so excited at getting something posted on the video sharing platform that they often forget the millions of hearing impaired viewers in the audience who would like to view these videos. Enabling subtitles on your YouTube video is easy and worthwhile, just switch on auto-captioning and take some time to edit the output for accuracy. Don’t forget that captions can be turned off if the visitor doesn’t wish to see them. Always use captioning over annotations which have been proven to be one of the biggest turn-offs for video viewers.  This video created by YouTube provides a useful overview to adding captions to your videos.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.