In our last post on marketing shifts, we unpacked the social rodeo that is live social video content. Shifts in availability and accessibility of brand and user-generated video content are changing the way corporate America spends its advertising and marketing dollars. What about social media marketing for nonprofits—many of which operate on a shoestring budget with limited overhead so as to best serve their cause. How are the shifts — specifically in social media marketing— impacting the nonprofit world?
In large part, the rise and success of social media is making a positive impact on fundraising and awareness activities, creating more opportunities to connect with new audiences than ever before. In fact, 55% of people who engage with nonprofits on social media end up taking some sort of action, 59% of those people make financial contributions, 53% volunteer and 43% attend or participate in charitable events in their community because of social media. Bottom line: if your nonprofit is not active on social media, you are missing out on a great opportunity to raise money, mobilize people, and do more good for your organization.
Here is a breakdown of how nonprofits and their audiences are connecting with each other on social media, courtesy of nonprofitsource.com:
These statistics speak for themselves. But how should nonprofits leverage these tools to accomplish their missions?
If you’re ready to step up your social media marketing outreach, here are some tips to get you started:
Image strategy is mission-critical to social media marketing and engagement. And given the emerging realities of social video (as we discussed in our previous post) video strategy may soon be even more important than still images. Visuals make a higher impact than words on their own. This has always been the case. This is why children’s early reader books have pictures — they are taught to use images as context clues. Images reinforce the message and help the story become memorable so that it can be remembered and retold. This is what we want in marketing — memorable and repeatable messages. Images get us there. Now, clearly, our target marketing is not children, but when you look at the stats relative to our diminishing attention spans you can see why you need to pack a punch in mere seconds if you want to make an impression. A social media scrolling through content is very likely to stop on a compelling image while a well written paragraph without an image will probably be ignored.
But don’t just throw up any old image, be sure you follow these best practices before you post:
After all, it is social media, the whole idea here is connection. Social media users expect an interactive experience and a response, usually within 24 hours and sometimes even within 1 hour (as is the case with Twitter users). This is a mistake that trips up both nonprofits and brands alike. Social media is more like a walkie talkie than a megaphone. If you initiate a conversation on social media, and your audience responds but gets no reply from you, what do you think will happen? They will lose confidence in your organization and move on to another one that’s actually listening. Luckily, activism resonates with younger audiences and you should have no trouble identifying a team of socially savvy volunteers who you can train and mobilize to serve as your social media response team.
As you prepare to engage, here are some best practices for social media conversations:
The biggest social media marketing challenge for nonprofits navigating these shifts is developing and implementing a social media strategy. It’s completely understandable because you are working hard on behalf of your cause. There is never an end to all that you have to do, and stopping the important work to “deal with” social media can feel like a waste of time but we can assure you that it is not. Many nonprofits have a presence on social media but not much else. If the presence doesn’t have a purpose there won’t be any fruit, low hanging or otherwise.
Before engaging donors or volunteers, we strongly recommend having a strategy in place that will inform your decisions, provide metrics and key performance indicators to keep you on track and know if what you’re doing is working. Developing a social media strategy can be tricky business for the savviest of marketers so if you run a nonprofit and need assistance with social media strategy please drop us a line, we would love to help unpack more of this for you and put into action a social media strategy for your nonprofit.