These are the notes from a 30 minute presentation given to Eagle County Gives last week.
Theme: Connect your various online marketing initiatives (specifically website, social media and email) to each other. Specifically addressed during this class is using your website and email marketing to make your social presence more powerful.
Recommendation: Make sure your homepage doesn’t just have links to your social media account, also add the like/share/+1 buttons. These will help your website visitors share/like immediately from any page on your website. Resources:
- How to Customize Your Social Share Buttons for Increased Traffic – has directions for each social platform with tips.
- How to Add Social Sharing Buttons to your Website – has good tips + list of services that make it easy to add share buttons to your website. Also, some general tips. I like Addshoppers and Flare
Recommendation: for your Social Media Sharing.
- Use Social media to thank your donors, volunteers and benefactors.
- Name people and businesses specifically @name
- Use 1-2 hashtags – it can increase readership of your posts
- Try Buffer or Hootsuite to automate some of your social posts. But remember to post by hand too.
- Spend an equal amount of time interacting with other people’s posts and accounts.
- Like, Share, +1 etc the other members of this group… and their posts
- stop and say hi to Trent and BlizzardPress on my social media!
Recommendation: Capture people’s name, telephone number and email consistently and regularly. Create internal systems to do this at all levels of your operations.
Recommendation: For a general social media strategy, focus on using social media to maintain and improve relationships with your donors, clients, and other people who are part of your network. If you do this, you will also attract new people… but don’t focus on attracting new people.
Use Facebook Advertising to convert these people into fans using two techniques:
- Target advertisements (including “Like” campaigns) by uploading your entire email contact list into Facebook and targeting your ads on these individuals. This will help you convert this group into Facebook Fans… and message them more easily in the future. Read more on Facebook Custom Audiences
- Target your website visitors with ads when they go back to Facebook. This is called retargeting or remarketing. Quick Guide to Facebook Retargeting. You can also setup retargeting on Twitter and Google Adwords.
Miscellaneous Tips:
- Use LinkedIn (personal) for targeted email marketing – by tagging the people you are connected with (no more than 50 people per tag), you can message everyone in your group that shares the same tag. Don’t overdue it!
- Use Google+ for targeted email marketing – when you make a post, make it public AND select one circle to send it to. That will give you the option to send an email as well, to the people in that circle. Don’t overdue it!
- Google has some special services for non-profits that are free. You can get free services from Google, including advertising “grants” to use in Adwords. Check them out!