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Manage Your NonProfit Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day

Your cause needs a social pulse but where do you find the time? When you have a million and one things to do and limited resources, social media has a tendency to fall off the list. And when it does… you miss an inexpensive opportunity to connect with your audience.

Storytelling is a staple for any non-profit looking to make a connection with new and old constituents. Social media can provide a viable interface to efficiently disseminate your message, but it can also be a huge time pitfall. The key to success lies in how you manage your tools.

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I’m sitting at the Eagle Library listening to Trent’s workshop, “Manage your Non-Profit Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day” and thought I would provide a play by play and share the word. So settle in, this is going to be a long one…   

The BIG Idea

Set your systems up so you can efficiently do your social media work in 10 minutes a day! Say what? The important word here is ‘systems’ and one I didn’t mention yet… tools. It is possible to automate and/or pre-schedule much of this work, streamlining the process so that you can do MORE with LESS. Read on…

Why Social?

Maintain relationships with your constituents, connect with people where they are, promote events, donor thanks, visual story telling space. Check.

The 4-4-11 Rule

This is a ratio of 10 social media posts. Every few days good practice is guided by this mantra for each social medium:

4 – The first four – interact with others on their platform 4x (get off your own page and share a Facebook post, engage by commenting or +1). Start conversations!

4 – The next four – share other people’s content 4x on your own page.

1 – One – share your original content once.

1 – One – promote yourself once.

Only 10% of what you do in social each day should be self promotional.

Why does this work? Your social “importance” grows through interaction and reciprocation. This is how and why other people or businesses find you valuable and eventually follow or share your original content.

The Networks

Facebook

The Algorithm.

Ever heard of that thing called, “the algorithm” (Google has one too, it’s all the rage)? Did you know that only a small percentage of what you post actually gets seen by your Facebook audience? Perhaps only 10%. Exciting posts grow their own legs as shares and likes grip the road and get traction. The more a post is interacted with, the more valuable Facebook deems it – and the more it will get seen. It’s part of their recipe for success and business model – and it’s all defined by a super complex social equation – the algorithm.

“The secret to a successful Facebook post… is a successful Facebook post”

The Boost. This is when you pay money to show your post to more people in your Facebook network. It’s a way to guarantee that first section of traffic visibility and then let the algorithm work on your behalf as people like and share simply because they saw it.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none”] TIP: Add your events to your blog, Facebook, Linked In, Google+, and your local paper!

Tags and Hashtags. You will get notified when someone tags and mentions you in their post. This is good practice when you are talking about others that have an account on Facebook. Two types of hashtags – keyword locator, create your own event tag – brand yourself, tongue in cheek/clever hashtag – a “modern haiku”, #NiceOneTrent.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none”] TIP: Take a look at the “create call to action” button – you can add this button to FB, it will show over your cover photo at top

Set Yourself Up. Make sure you follow relevant people and businesses in your newsfeed so when it comes time to interact (on your first 4), you can easily find relevant things to comment on or share. Setup your lists so you can find groups of news easily to interact with and share.

FACTS:

  • Images and videos get almost 2x as much activity
  • 80 to 150 characters is the Facebook sweet spot
  • 1-3pm, Thursdays and Fridays is the timeslot with the highest usage
  • Saturdays and Sundays offer less competition for your posts

Twitter

Reach out to your people where they are at. Deliver “real-time” value. Tends to be a younger crowd. Twitter is quick and easy to “do in the background”.

Twitter is more timely and has no algorithm – everyone has an opportunity to see everything. BUT the feeds move fast, there is lots of noise. In this medium it’s perfectly acceptable to recycle sound bytes, even several times in a day. Just like Facebook, when you add an image to your tweets, you will get tons more engagement. The annoyance line here is a bit longer – you can push more out this channel and not offend as quickly.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none” link=”http://www.tweepi.com”] TOOL TIP: Use FREE Tweepi for Twitter Management

Tweepi has lots of following and management tools that allow you to use Twitter more effectively to connect with groups of people. Follow friends of friends, find relevant lists. Lots of mercenary strategies you can use to build your followership. Use lists to create a niche!

LinkedIn

A super sweet rolodex. Great for non-profit development work, B2B connections and a great place to find new employees.

LinkedIn is perhaps more of a personal networking space versus your average business resource. You can and should however, have your business listed in LinkedIn – it’s similar to Facebook in that you need to be a person first before you can create your business page.

Pinterest

This is a woman’s world. If twitter are young people, Pinterest is women. Perfect for visual storytelling and really connecting with the female audience (of all ages).

Instagram

Much younger demographic, empowers mobile photo photos for sharing and easily connects to Facebook and Twitter for mobile photo flow to those channels as well.

YouTube and Vine

Again, young demographic. Be here if you do videos.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none”] POWER USER TIP (and big time saver):

Use Google Chrome’s “personality” feature to quickly switch between accounts. All your logins are saved in separate browser windows and you can quickly swap between them.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none” link=”http://www.buffer.com”] TOOL TIP: Buffer

This is a social media management tool. With one stroke, you can share to multiple accounts. Their FREE version allows you to share to up to four social accounts simultaneously – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn for instance.

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none”] TOOL TIP: You can also schedule future posts directly in Facebook if you want to use tagging, etc.

Finding Content

[mk_font_icons icon=”mk-icon-lightbulb-o” color=”#00a4db” size=”medium” padding_horizental=”2″ padding_vertical=”2″ align=”none” link=”http://www.feedly.com”] TOOL TIP: Feedly

Blog reading software. An aggregator where you can add blogs relevant to your mission so that you can easily curate and share content from other sources.

The End

OK – there’s only so much that can be delivered in two hours. This is certainly a quick down and dirty, but there are many good tips here to get you pointed in the right direction.

Take a look at Buffer and Feedly especially and put those 10 minutes each day to work for you and your cause. We’d all love to hear your story – get it out there!

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