5 tips to help your nonprofit fundraising content get shared on Facebook

Using social media to help reach your online nonprofit fundraising goals is an important ongoing concern for organizations of all sizes. While almost all charities now have some presence on Facebook are you doing all you can to help your content to be found, shared and liked? Today I’ll share five important tips that will increase the opportunities for potential donors to find your website, read and share your content and hopefully later even become donors. Facebook remains perhaps the most important social media platform and more organization pages are followed due to the activities of ‘friends’ than you could ever imagine.

As you enhance your cause based content and share it online it’s particularly important that you make it as easy (and likely) as possible for your audience to share that content with others. Some of these ideas I hope you may already be doing but hopefully there may be some that you’ve yet to try – they are fairly easy to master and can instantly provide more avenues to improve the reach of your nonprofit’s news and updates.

Depending on your experience you should be able to test and use most of these tips instantly but in some cases you might want to hand this over to your web developer.

New larger images on Facebook – Optimize Your Images for Facebook Link Posts

You’ve probably noticed recent changes on Facebook have made your linked images far larger in the newsfeed. In keeping with so much of what’s happening in social media images have become even more vital, so try to select eye-catching images whenever you can for your blog posts or link updates. Make sure you take advantage of these new dimensions by selecting images that really stand out – Facebook will select the largest image on the linked page (or only image if there is just one being used in the url) as the default. The optimal image size for Facebook sharing is 1200 x 627 px – or of course larger but using that same image ratio of 1.9:1

Adding Like Buttons to all the content that you choose

Hopefully you’re already doing this by default with your blog or when you add important news to your website and if you check Facebook Insights you know just how viral this can become for your content visits/shares. If you’re using a standard blogging platform you should already know just how to add a like button to your posts and pages, but did you know you can add a like button (image below) to any web page? Just follow the steps below which I’ve also created a graphic for:

• Head over to the Facebook Developers ‘like box for pages’ page
• Fill in the boxes to configure as needed and take note of the preview, then select the options you like until you are complete
• Click on the blue ‘Get Code’ box and add the provided code in full to your webpage

Full instructions for your custom Facebook like box (click to enlarge)

Improve your site description within Facebook Graph

Your website meta code generates a default description for your site/page that will be added to all Facebook links that you generate. It’s definitely worth running the Facebook Debugger to check what your audience are seeing on Facebook. To take care of this follow the steps below:

• Visit the Facebook Debugger page to view your current markup code
• Enter the full URL that you wish to check and click the blue ‘Debug’ button
• Review your results which will include your meta description, thumbnail options and more

With this tool you can see exactly what added information your audience sees about your site via Facebook – you may need to share this information with your web developer if you need to make changes. *Also, depending on how your site has been set up you may already have an ‘open graph ID’ which you would enter in place of your URL.

Embed Facebook Sharing to specified text or images

Facebook Sharer allows you to share specific elements of your page, post or update. You can embed to a line of text or an image so that when a user clicks on it the Facebook share window will instantly appear for the user – this is ideal for custom graphics that you create to help share news particularly for events etc. It’s incredibly easy to do and very effective, just follow the steps below:

• Visit the Facebook Sharer page – you’ll need to add your own unique url to the entry below where I’ve written ‘www.yourwebsitename.com’ after the u= command. Full example below.
• https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=www.yourwebsitename.com
• Test that the share link works correctly
• Embed this full url to create a text or graphic link to your post or page

Monitor Facebook via Google Analytics

Recent changes to Google Analytics have greatly enhanced how you can track social media traffic to your site(s) and of course how they share content. Keep an eye on what’s happening via Analytics which is easy and quick to monitor on a regular basis. Instructions below:

• Visit Google Analytics
• Click on Acquisition
• Click on Social
• Click on Facebook

Please let me know if you add any of these methods to your current social media tactics with Facebook and how they work for you. In the interest of space I’ve kept the instructions brief but hopefully easy to follow and implement but should you run into any problems or need help please leave a message in the contents and I’ll be happy to try and help.

Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including 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.