Christine Ward People spend a lot of time on social media, and a huge part of nonprofit marketing is meeting supporters where they are — on their phones, in their email, on search engines and, yes, on social media. Capturing social media traffic isn’t difficult, but it does take time and a well-rounded knowledge of your audience.
Is your nonprofit already active on social media? It may be time to up your game, get your supporters to engage with your posts and click your links. Social media traffic may just be what you’re missing on your website. The following tips are a great start to building out your social media strategy to work for your nonprofit’s supporters.
Know Your Followers
For your social media efforts to be most effective, you’ll want to determine which platforms your audience already participates on. Find out the old fashioned way by asking around, or send out a survey to your email subscribers. Joining the social channels that your supporters are already active on will help you make the most out of your time.
Once you’re set up on the same social media channels as your supporters (as your nonprofit’s capacity allows), the next step is to engage with them. It’s also a good idea to keep track of the times of day when they’re most likely to see your posts, and then post more during those times.
You know your supporters, but social media isn’t the same as interacting in person or through email. Look at how they participate on social media and post content to goes along with that. Take note of the tone and subject matter of their posts. Are they posting funny memes or an educated commentary on current events? Maybe it’s a little of both! Take note so you can tailor your posts to your audience.
Create Shareable Content
When a follower shares your content, your audience expands to include your follower’s audience as well. Take advantage of this by creating content that your current audience is likely to share with their followers.
This goes beyond creating the content that your followers want to see to create content that your followers want to share. Oftentimes, this means visual and interactive content that encourages an emotional connection to your cause. Videos, high-quality photos, infographics, survey results and case studies are all great examples of content you can create to cultivate shares.
Use Hashtags
Another way to expand your reach is to make good use of hashtags. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ all allow for hashtags. People search in hashtags, so using them correctly will give your post the opportunity to be seen by more people, especially people who may not already follow your nonprofit. Keep up with the hashtags related to your cause and use them as it makes sense contextually within your posts.
Share Older Content
There’s a good chance that a big chunk of your audience missed your nonprofit’s update when you posted it the first time. They’re following you on social media because they want to see your updates, but they can’t be on social media 24/7.
Sharing things such as blog posts and calls to action more than once is perfectly acceptable. Write a new caption and share last month’s blog post. Come up with a few different ways to remind supporters that you have a fundraising campaign coming up. Try sharing the second post at a different time and/or day of the week to reach even more people.
Go Viral
Think about it. Posting content more than once puts it in front of more eyes, meaning it has a better chance of catching on and going viral than if you only share it once.
Of course, there’s a limit to this. Blasting out the same blog post five days in a row will start to annoy your followers. A reasonable strategy could be posting an old blog post with an updated description a month after it’s published.
Want to drive more website traffic? Check out our guide for more tips >
Use Visuals
Posts with photos, videos or graphics attract more attention than posts without a visual element. Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement and tweets with images are 150% more likely to be re-tweeted. Those stats are too good to ignore! Adding images to your social media posts will increase engagement from your supporters.
Driving social media traffic to your website can be an awesome way to promote your organization and encourage a whole new crowd of supporters to complete key actions on your website. Try out a few of these tips to get started. Once you’re comfortable, experiment more and more to deepen your knowledge of your audience and the content and calls to action they’re looking for.
Is your nonprofit driving social media traffic to your website? What works for you? Share your additional tips and tricks in the comments below.
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