5 top social media tips for nonprofits for July

Welcome to our second monthly summary of the best social media tips for nonprofit fundraising. Time-saving tips, audience growth ideas and suggestions to improve donor interaction can each help your nonprofit to better engage with donors and create new opportunities locally and beyond. My goal is to help make your time spent on social media more efficient and effective to enable your audience are able to find, follow and share your latest news. Here’s a link to the top six nonprofit social media tips for last month, now let’s see what July had to offer.

Twitter: Activate Twitter Cards to help get your content noticed

I plan to cover this in more depth soon but if you’ve yet to activate Twitter Cards then you really should do so today. Once activated on your website, the shared links on Twitter will display photos, videos, and other media automatically. The goal is helping to get your content noticed – the tool allows you to take up more real estate in users’ feeds, and can increase clicks to your website. Here’s a link to get started via Twitter.

 Instagram: Build you audience by adding videos in addition to your photos

Instagram added the option to upload videos a few months back and based on initial research the like/comment rates (overall) for videos are very encouraging. The platform is of course known for photos but video marketing in general continues to skyrocket and I’d bank on it being used by more and more Instagram users. There are a number of considerations such as video length (3 to 15 seconds in duration) and at present you can upload your videos directly from  Apple iOS 3GS phone or newer running iOS 5.0 or later Android Android 4.0 or later. For all the details please visit the Instagram video help page.

LinkedIn: You can share almost anything you’ve written or created via LinkedIn Publications

LinkedIn is one of the very best peer to peer resources in the business world which translates just as effectively to charities. Visitors to your account can learn a great deal about your organization but there’s also more you can share. Did you know that you can add ‘publications’ to your LinkedIn company profile?

Whether you want to add a special report via a .pdf, a fundraising brochure as a powerpoint presentation or simply link to recent blog posts or press releases you can add all types of documents via a hosted link to your publications library at LinkedIn. So long as the document is actively hosted (via a live url) you can publish it. Instructions are below, it’s incredibly useful, worthwhile and easy to do.

Facebook: How can I improve the chances of showing up in the feeds of our followers?

All regular users of Facebook are quite literally bombarded with updates via their feed settings and for your organization to get noticed it is important to consider how what you post can help boost interaction – followers tend to keep feeds visible if they find the content engaging. Here are a few easy tips to help your content get noticed via Facebook feeds.

Use photographs whenever possible; visuals are proven to be far more likely to result in a click or a visit. Most visitors to Facebook are looking to skim and filter information rather than read so images help more than you might imagine. Ask your audience questions; participation is so important with social media and the chance to answer questions not only provides you with valuable data but it helps your audience feel far more involved. Variety is the spice of Facebook; don’t always promote events or your point of view but mix it up as much as you can. Remember how difference your audience are to one another and provide a variety of information as your updates – some days you’ll want to mention a fundraising goal while on others you may want to celebrate the birthday of one your team or share information about another cause important to your heart. Ensure that your About Us page is informative; when someone is about to follow you the first thing they’re likely to check is your ‘about us’ page. Make sure that the information has all been filled out, is current and that links are working. Concise information is the goal, there is no need for paragraphs of biographical facts.

Twitter: You can now ‘pin’ a tweet to the top of your page – here’s why you should. 

Typically, the vast majority of those who view your Twitter account will be doing so either for the first time or the first time in recent weeks. As a result your most recent tweet can tell them a great deal about your nonprofit so it makes sense to be able to have a specific tweet take pride of place. That tweet might be a link to some fundraising news or a special event – but most importantly it will be one that’s a great introduction to your account. Ask yourself this – if a new Twitter follower could only see one tweet, what would you want it to be? The video below explains exactly how to pin a tweet.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGzuP0ZKlw[/youtube]

How to pin a tweet to the top of your profile

 I do hope you’ll find these useful and if you need assistance please add your comments and I’ll be happy to try and help. If you have any favourite social media tips for nonprofits please share them.

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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.