June 20 – Nonprofit Communications Best Practices: Tips for Using Social Media Effectively
Susan: Welcome to our webinar. I’m
Susan Hope Bard. I am the Training and Education Manager here at
TechSoup. And today we are super excited to bring Nonprofit Communications Best
Practices: Tips for Using Social Media. And our presenter today is Molly Bacon.
And before I turn this presentation over to her I do want to go over a few things
with you. I’m going to share my desktop very quickly. And what you’ll see is, this
is your screen that you should be seeing with someone talking. If you need to adjust
the settings, simply click on the gear, and then you can go to Quality. You can
go anywhere from Auto where it adjusts for you, or up to 720. So if the
screen ever appears fuzzy, you can go ahead and fix it yourself, or you can play
with that to get the best resolution.
Another thing that I do want to share with you
is that all of the content that you will see today and that you have seen in the
past, you can view that at any time. We record each of these events. You
simply go to the date of the event. And I have April and May all in one module.
But if you want to go view April 11th, you can simply click on that TAB. You can
view the video. You can complete the survey. You can look at all of the resources. So for
today’s event, what’s already in there is the Survey which we want you to take at the
end, and then all of Molly’s links. So a lot of you are going to worry about
some of the content she shares with you. Don’t worry, because everything is in the
course. You simply go back to this module, June 20th, and you can click on her presentation
and you can click on any of the links with all of the resources that she’s put together
for you. So I just want to make you aware of that before I turn it over to Molly.
I will also
be chatting out the links in the chat box. Feel free to also ask any questions you might
have. And I’m going to turn it over to Molly. Molly: Hi there. I’m Molly. I’m the
Social Media Manager at TechSoup. I have been managing social media
accounts for over 5 years for nonprofits and businesses. And I’m
excited today to show you some tips. This will be
geared towards beginners, so people who are just getting started on
social media for your nonprofit or organization. And really, if you have already existing
profiles, you can use this to optimize and rethink your strategy, so it’s still
valuable, but I just want to let you know that this will be geared toward
beginners. So let’s get started. I’m going to share my screen now. Can you see it? So here it is. So we are
going to start with the Agenda. So today I hope that you will be able to
walk away and Establish Your Target Audience, Set Your Goals for your social media channels,
actually Choose the social media channels that are best for your organization,
Establish Your Brand Voice on social media, learn how to Optimize with Analytics,
and really what you should be thinking about when it comes to that.
So let’s start. Let’s
talk about the target audience and channels. So who are you trying to reach, is
the first question we should ask. Are these donors, members, new
customers, advocates, influencers? And then based on who your target audience
is, then you are going to establish what are their demographics. What
are their age? What is their gender? Are they in urban areas or rural areas? Are
they in the United States or are they global? So once you figure out that, then you are going
to say, “Well, how can I reach these people on social media?” So depending on the
social media channels there’s a little bit of different demographics.
So it’s very important to first establish your own demographics
and target audience for your organization, and then actively think about what channels
are going to be the best to suit those.
Social Media Demographics, I love the
statistics. So did you know that YouTube reaches more 18 to 49-year-olds than
any cable network in the United States? And I have the link there for you guys so
you can see. And you have 2.8 billion people on social media, so this is not a small number.
We know that this is a very large number of people. So it is best to make sure you are on the
right ones. So let’s go through each one. Again, the links are provided if you
want to follow up with more details on these. I have the articles that I’m referencing
here. So Facebook is the largest platform with the most amount of users.
And
there are technically more women than men but by only a slight amount. And you
will see that ages 18 through really 65+ are all using this platform. So this is a very
wide range of users in terms of age demographics. And we can also see that the location is
pretty similar as well. So there are people in urban areas, suburban areas, and rural
areas. The education level is pretty vast. It’s between, it’s not just college-educated
people, and income levels as well. So Facebook is great for a lot of different
audiences and it’s a great one to get started with. Instagram is more younger generation. It’s
the 18 to 29-year-olds is the largest amount.
And it’s pretty significantly larger than
the others, and it’s a little bit more women than men. And you will find that on
Instagram, was bought by Facebook, and so it is only growing. It’s growing
a lot. And I think you will start to see these users change. So it might not be the best
audience if you’re trying to reach older right now, but keep an eye on it because, in a few years, you
never know where these numbers are going to go. But we will say that urban, suburban,
and rural are all really using Instagram, so all locations are good there.
And income levels
are a little bit lower than Facebook of course, because it’s a younger population. And
Instagram is all photo and video-based, so just keep that in mind. Twitter, there
are more women than men but only slightly. So you kind of see this across all platforms
in this statistic based throughout social. And Twitter is again, really it’s mostly
younger people but you do see a large amount, compared to Instagram, you see more
older generations on Twitter as well. And you also see it across different
locations and education types. And then LinkedIn is a professional platform,
so keep that in mind. It is a different focus than the others. And you will see again, a
larger amount of older people from 50 to 65, a lot larger than Twitter.
So you really
can see here that there is a large range as well as Facebook on the amount of aged
users and the locations you see are again, not as being as popular in rural
areas, so that is something to keep in mind. It is more urban and suburban areas.
And on the bottom, you can even see the employed v. nonemployed.
So that’s interesting. And then Pinterest is more women. Again,
younger but it does have some 30 to 64-year-olds, a decent amount. And this is
used for obviously visual purposes. So a lot of people use it for style and
weddings, that’s a big one, and DIY crafts and things like that. So it has
a little bit of a different focus.
Infographics can work well
here, as well as in linking to your blogs. But keep in mind that the actual focus and
the users are going to be different here, so you’re going to have
to curate your content here. But people will be generating
pins from your content as well, so just keep an eye on that. So then next, let’s talk about
what types of content you can post. So you haven’t chosen a platform yet.
You
are just still establishing what’s capable within your organization. What are you able to
post right now with the resources that you have at your organization? So let’s talk about that.
So Blogs, at TechSoup we have a pretty big blog. So on the right-hand side of that post, you can
see that this was a post that we recently did. And you can see here that this was our blog.
And you can tell that it’s straight from our blog and that’s a graphic that we were able
to use. But we also have a Medium channel and this is a new initiative that we took
on.
But I wanted to point this out to you all because if you don’t have a blog
yet but want to get one started, this can be a great option for you. After all,
you don’t need to add it to your existing website. And if that seems like a technical big leap,
check out Medium and see what is possible on there, because you might be inspired.
And we love to repost that content from either our blog or our Medium channel
onto our Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. And the great thing is that it
generates more traffic.
Next is GIFs. These are animated figures,
so you can take multiple images or videos, and merge them into a GIF file. Giphy is a free
platform, so I encourage you all to go check it out as well. And you can take gifs directly from
this platform. You can create your gifs and upload them to the platform, or even
create these slide show gifs on the platform. It is a lot easier than it sounds. It
is not as intimidating as it might look. And as I was saying, you can search for anything
that you are thinking of putting on Twitter. A lot of times it is used for kind of
funny celebrity things like movies or shows in the GIF. But you can also create your own. So
you can screencast and stuff, they have an app. So just think about that. That’s a great
way to generate content pretty easily.
Branded Graphics are also good. We
use these a lot. So these were created, the top ones were created by our designers.
And those are if you have graphics in-house, you can use
Instagram and Post those things. Quoted Photos is another one. We do, and
we just started this #MondayMotivation. It’s a great hashtag to use. And here you
can see we are just putting text on top of – this is Instagram – on top of an
image.
So this is simple to do. And you can do this actually with Canva and
Adobe Spark. And these are both free platforms, so it’s nonintimidating. You
don’t need a designer for this at all. So this can be added to your content
strategy if you have the resources. But like I said, it doesn’t take an extra designer.
So make sure you check out those platforms. And a tip is to focus on social
media days and use tagging in posts. So on Twitter, you can tag other
organizations. So on World Environment Day, we tagged a bunch of amazing
nonprofits that are helping the world. And it got great engagement as you
can see.
So that’s a little tip right there, a kind of best practice. But also the best
practice is to create a calendar, and include all of the social
media days that are important and going to create a lot of traffic.
So obviously Call toActions, and Videos are also very important. So think about
what action you want people to take. Is it around advocacy? Is it around
fundraising? Do you have any videos existing? Do you have a YouTube? If not,
would you put your videos on YouTube? Think about that. Adobe Spark also is a
great platform for creating videos quickly. So again, you don’t need an in-house
video person. We also post our webinars. So if you have webinars you can post webinars
in there. I posted this webinar right now, our TS30. But you can see that
we also created a Facebook event, so that’s kind of a good tip as well. And then Infographics, this is from our
Pinterest. As you can see we saved this pin. So we always save our pins on Pinterest,
so that’s kind of a best practice.
So if you do have infographics think
about adding that to your content strategy. And then Live Videos. We recently started
doing more live videos at TechSoup, because it is so popular here on Facebook.
And now they have it on Instagram. And even Twitter kind of lets you go live. So
think about how you can partner with other organs or kind of get the word out.
If you partner with another org, we partnered with Global Fund
for Women in this example, you can get more shares likes, and views.
So that’s kind of a tip.
So think about those, what kind of content can you post? Okay, so next we are going to talk about
Goals. So we have a Social Media Starter Kit that Lewis, our Social Media Senior
Manager created. It’s amazing. And I think you all should check it out. We
are going to go through this a little bit in our goals here, but I do encourage you
to go back and download it and reference it because there’s a part where you can
fill in your own goals in sections. So we are going to go through it
briefly here, and then I’m going to show you some examples, so we’ll
go into creating these goals. So some of the goals could be Brand
Awareness. So this is the most common goal people have. And this is because people
think that social media is a great way to grow your brand. And it really
is. You can reach new audiences and get people to be more familiar
and identify with your brand. So that’s a great goal.
Community
Engagement is another great goal if you are trying to get people
to advocate for a specific thing and you want a community around that, or
you are trying to get a community of people who are advocating on behalf of your
brand. There might be different ways if you are trying to pass, get a law passed, or
something and you want to get a group together of your top advocates, social media can be
a way to do that. So that could be a goal. Content Distribution is another one.
Again, if you have those blogs, or you have really important information on
your website you want to get out, you can distribute
it through social media. Lead Generation is the process of
actually generating names and emails, identifying what type of customers you want
to reach out to, and then figuring out a way to obtain their names and emails.
For
us, it’s going to be a lead generation example in this toolkit, social media toolkit.
You can go there enter your name and email, and download it and that is a lead generation.
And we would promote that on social, and actually, there are ads you can do
as well. And then Fundraising and Revenue, so focus on turning your followers
into donors and supporters. Customer Support, are you
going to use Facebook Messenger? A lot of people these days
are going on Facebook Messenger and directly reaching out to TechSoup.
So a best practice is to always make sure that you are responding, and that
you have a regularly responding rate. So they kind of rate you like if you
respond within 24 hours or 4 hours. So you want that number to go down.
So make sure you are always checking that if you do consider that to be your goal. And then Influencer Marketing,
do you want to reach famous people who are going to advocate for your
brand’s behalf? That’s another goal. And then Earned Media and Press,
it’s kind of an old-school way, but if you want to directly engage
with the press, that can be a goal.
And then Social Media Listening,
we use this a lot at TechSoup. It could be that you want to make sure you
understand fully the nonprofit industry, the nonprofit technology industry. So that
might mean that you are constantly checking the hashtag #nptech. That’s what
we do. So that can be another goal. So think about these. Make
sure your goals are Smart Goals. So that means making sure your goals are
specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. So as you are going
through and establishing your goals, make sure you go through and
ensure that they are smart because you never want to
goal that is unattainable.
And then this is again, this Social Media
Starter Kit. So if you download the Starter Kit it allows you to check
which goals you want to focus on. It has a better case study
and applied goals and metrics. It’s a very good example, so go back through
after. We are going to go through two examples now that I have. But make sure you select at
least 3, but you could choose more than that. And these can be, you can change these to fit
your organization’s needs as time goes on. Maybe your goals are 3 months, or
2 months, but you can always go back and make new goals. So feel free
to download that and check that out. So let’s go through this. So an example would
be our goal is to increase brand awareness. So what does that mean? That means that
you want to increase your Followers. You want to increase Reach and Impressions.
You want to increase Likes, Shares, and Retweets. You might want to increase your Social
Ads. These things are going to help establish if your brand is getting bigger on social
media. And then how will you measure this? So Klout Score – I have a link there for
you all – Klout Score is looking at all your social platforms if you’re
on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
And then it’s going to say between all
your followers and all your engagements and everything like that, this is your score.
So it is kind of like your influencer score. So that is a good way to measure if your
brand is going up on social media over time. Another way to track that would be
natively in the analytics dashboard. So that means the Twitter
Analytics, or in Facebook Insights. They have all their analytics there.
So you can track it just within there. You don’t need an external platform. But I did
list a bunch of external social media platforms that help you schedule postings, help you look at
analytics, and are good for reporting. So these are a few that I think are pretty
good and aren’t too expensive to get started. So I think they are good entry-level,
If you’re just starting and you are overusing the native platform, you might want to try these
out. So I have other links for you there. So let’s go and make a goal now.
So on TechSoup, we say we are going to gain 150 Twitter followers
and 200 mentions a month.
And we can say that we are going to do
this because we know from our past patterns that this is an attainable and
reasonable goal. And we can measure it because it’s a specific number. Then we are
going to track results on Twitter in a spreadsheet and HootSuite. So okay to check
things on a spreadsheet, we do that all the time. So that’s how are going to measure it.
So here on the left-hand side is Twitter. This is in the analytics platform you can
see that we are getting a lot of data here.
So we can see that we can track our followers.
We can track the Twitter impressions, tweets, and mentions. And you can export
this under tweets. So we can export. And then if you look on the right-hand side, this is a HootSuite. So it’s one of those social media management
platforms that I was talking about. And this is where we can dive deeper. It’s a little
bit more, it’s a little bit more user-friendly, easier to look at, and easier to
analyze the statistics and data. But you don’t need this.
Like I said,
you can export monthly. We do both because we like to keep track of both.
So take a look at those and make sure you are always looking at them. So another
goal is to increase Community Engagement. So if we want to increase community engagement
around a specific thing, an example is, we are going to host #CloseTheGap
Twitter chat, to build a community around the digital gender divide and technology.
So we want to get more people to talk about the digital gender divide and
women in tech. We are going to partner with 3 or more influential nonprofits and get
100 retweets, and 100 likes during the chat. So that was kind of what our goal
was.
We are going to measure that with hashtag traffic, by hashtag #trafic, and by using Twitter and HootSuite Insights. So here’s an example. We hosted this
chat and it was pretty successful. We partnered with over 4 nonprofits and
we had a bunch of people participate. And we did measure the traffic and we
surpassed our goal. And that’s because our goal was very reasonable from what we kind of
anticipated. We thought we’d only got 3, but we got 4 nonprofits, so that
was even better and that’s kind of why we surpassed so much farther. And on
the right-hand side here is a snapshot of what HootSuite Insights showed
us. It tracked all that for us, so we were able to kinda just go and see the
snapshot of the day.
It’s a little bit inaccurate because people could have been using
this hashtag throughout the day, but you can always manually track this as well.
It’s always going to be a little bit skewed, but it does help you
understand how well you did. So you can see here our top mention
of the month was by Women Who Code who was one of our partners in this
chat.
And for May that was the top mention. So that was a really good engagement. So after that you are going to go back
after you’ve kind of chosen your goals, you are going to go back and see what
your organization is capable of doing. What resources do you have for these goals?
And how can you select the right channels? So again, looking at our Social Media Starter
Kit, I’m going to just briefly go through this now. We have a list of benefits of
each platform, an example of what types of goals are good for the platform, what kind
of content works well, and what things you should consider.
So go back
through this, take a look at this. On the right-hand side, we added
Snapchat which I didn’t discuss earlier. Keep in mind that Snapchat is a younger
generation, so if you are trying to reach that older audience it is not going to be ideal
for you. So I don’t suggest worrying too much about that one.
Focus more on Instagram which
might have a larger audience in the future. And remember your important
brand voice on social. So here are a few that I’m just briefly going to
walk through, but again, this is in the Starter Kit. You can see that you want to think
about your character and persona. So how are you portraying yourself on social
media? What kind of tone are you using? Are you honest? Are you cheerful? At
TechSoup, we try to be not so formal. And we try to be honest of course,
and we try to be cheerful and fun. What kind of language? Do you not say specific
words? Do you not spell your organization a specific way? Do you want to be
playful? Do you want to have fun? Do you want to be more to the point?
Make sure that you establish that.
And then your purpose, what you want to do
on there. Do you want to motivate people, educate people, inspire, engage? So a lot of these
you might say we want to do all of these, but make sure you establish this. Because
you have different people managing your social media, like more than
one person, you want everybody to be on the same page with the
way your brand is being looked at because it is a huge point of contact.
People might find you there before they go to your website. And lastly,
is that you want to optimize. So metrics are very important. And
just keep in mind that you can fail, and you try things, and you learn from
them. At TechSoup many times we’ve had posts that get one or zero likes. And
honestly, this is something that happens especially today.
As we get more
and more users on social media, we find that every org is kind of struggling to
stay afloat there and get the likes and shares they like because it’s too competitive. So don’t
beat yourself up about it, it is all about testing. And that is what every social
media person should tell you because everyone is always testing
and iterating and learning from that.
So metrics are huge, huge, huge. So
Most Popular Posts, weekly at TechSoup we have a meeting and we talk
about what posts perform best. And sometimes we even look at the least
performing posts and we try to analyze that. So I suggest for best
practice, you do the same. And then Post Timing, on the right-hand
side here if you are getting started and you haven’t posted yet, you can
take a look at some of the best times to post. And this blog piece on Spout Social has a list
of kinds of every platform. So you can start there. There is kind of average time when
the most amount of users are online. That’s kind of a pro tip. So you can start
there. But then your users might be different.
So if you are posting on the East
Coast time, if you are posting Global, you’re going to have to think
about what time your audience is on. And the analytics within each
platform should also tell you that. So after you’ve started posting
you can go back and look at that. Also, think about the Frequency of Your
Posts. Are you posting 5 times a week on Facebook? Are you posting twice
a day? Kind of keep an eye out on what is performing the best, and test that.
And then Media Types, also be testing that out.
Of course, images and videos are performing
the best on social media, so try to use those as much as possible. But test it out. See why
one video or image does better than the other. And then make sure you test
out your Call To Action. If you are just starting, I suggest maybe
just having a Contest and partnering, testing that out, and seeing if that
would work to get more people engaged. And then, of course, test Stories and
Lives. Stories are just on Instagram. But if you do go to Instagram and you
post, make sure you do a story that day too, because it kind of gets people to notice
that more. So that is a huge new feature that is great for getting more exposure.
So I’m just about finished here, so I’m going to leave you with
hopefully some time for questions. I don’t know if we have a few minutes.
But
if anybody has, feel free to also tweet me if you have questions in the future. That is
my Twitter there. And if you want to learn more about social media fundraising, feel
free to check out this blog post here. And then all links from these
slides are in the TechSoup course. So feel free to go back and reference all of
those. And send me any questions that you have. Thanks so much. Susan: Great, Molly, thank you. Very
quickly we still have about 2 minutes so I did want to open up the floor for
any questions. Throughout this presentation, I have been rapidly chatting
out all these amazing resources.
Molly and I are in the same
room, so for the past few webinars, we’ve been able to share this space
so we can kind of queue each other. But I want to make sure that those of
you who are on the platform right now, this is your opportunity to ask Molly any
questions. You can of course tweet her later, or connect with her at any point, but
we do want to leave it open for you. We’ve given you a lot of resources for you
to both I guess, kind of dive into more detail about metrics, about creating
[indistinct], and also about demographics. There is a lot of good information in there.
This is kind of the 2nd in a series of events about social media.
So if you are interested
in some of the other topics Molly mentioned, Spark was a program that she did back
in May. So there’s a half-hour webinar. If you go to May 2017, and click
on the 2nd tab, you’ll see Spark, and you can learn more about Spark. And we
also had Fundraising Tips Using Social Media, which was 2 weeks ago. So we
hope you check those out as well. It is important to us that you give us
feedback. Right now we have a lot of folks coming to these events and we want to
make sure that we engage with you. You have the opportunity to ask questions. The
chat box is right there for you, so feel free to chat anything you want.
Also
complete the survey. Just go to the week that we are in right now, June 20, click
on that module and you’ll see the survey. It is right in the middle. You can
complete it and forward it back to us. And that way Molly and I can
see what else we can do better or what we should do
differently to meet your needs. As always, you can reach out to me
as well. I’m Susan. I’m with TechSoup. I’m the Training and Education Manager, so
feel free. My email is also in the course. Anything else you want to add Molly? Molly: Feel free to send us your social
media channels once you get off the ground with your social media, kinda
strategy, and start adding more platforms, feel free to send it to us.
And we are happy
to follow and engage with you on social media. So we are all in this together. So also
check out TechSoup’s social media channels. We have every channel. So whatever
one you are on, let’s engage, let’s get social. And thanks
so much for joining today. Susan: All right, thanks, Molly.
𝗢𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘀 ᶦˢ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵍᵘᵃʳᵈᶦᵃⁿ ᵃⁿᵍᵉˡ ᵗʳʸᶦⁿᵍ ᵗᵒ ˢᵉⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ᵃⁿ ᵘʳᵍᵉⁿᵗ ᵐᵉˢˢᵃᵍᵉ? ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ꜱᴇᴇᴋ ɢᴜɪᴅᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴꜱɪɢʜᴛꜱ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀꜱᴛ, ᴘʀᴇꜱᴇɴᴛ, ᴀɴᴅ ꜰᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴡɪᴛʜ qᴜᴇꜱᴛɪᴏɴꜱ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ʟᴏᴠᴇ, ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘꜱ, ᴏʀ ᴍᴏɴᴇʏ – ᴄᴏɴɴᴇᴄᴛ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴀɴɢᴇʟ ᴛᴏᴅᴀʏ https://aef5aa-t-ztics23v7-ljxbw4j.hop.clickbank.net/
