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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

How Your Nonprofit Can Use Twitter–Even If You Don’t Tweet

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What are people saying about your nonprofit?  Who lives in your area and cares about your cause?  Who’s looking for your help right now?

You can find out.  You won’t have to hire a private investigator or ask the NSA to give you secret data.  What you need is Twitter search.

Is Your Constituency on Twitter?

You may be surprised at who’s using Twitter these days.  “For Black Americans, the social network of choice may very well be Twitter, as 25% of Twitter users are African Americans (approximately double the U.S. population),” says marketing expert Jay Baer.

In fact, a Pew study reveals, “The typical Twitter user is an 18-29 year-old educated minority with a well-paying job, and slightly more likely to be male than female…Use of Twitter across all age demographics is on the rise.”

Listening In to Conversations

Twitter offers you the chance to be a fly on the wall when the people you care about are talking.  As Tao of Twitter author Mark Schaefer points out, “If you search Google, Bing or Yahoo, your results will be articles, videos, and websites. But if you search Twitter, the results are real-time conversations.”

What could your nonprofit find out by listening in to conversations on Twitter?  Let’s say your mission is to create affordable housing.  You could find:

  • People living in your town who have expressed positive sentiments about affordable housing
  • Tweets that mention your agency by name
  • Elected officials who have (or noticeably have not) addressed the issue
  • Media personalities who take an interest in the issue
  • Donors to your organization and what’s on their minds

Getting In On the Conversation

Even if you never send a tweet yourself, this information could be highly valuable to you.  You could add like-minded people to your mailing list, or recruit a public figure to speak at your next event.  You could find out how you look to your community.  You could do donor and prospect research that produces more gifts.

But if you tweet, you make yourself part of the conversation.  Imagine:

  1. Building a relationship with that high-powered donor who’s too busy to have a meeting, but always answers his tweets.
  2. Answering questions about affordable housing so that people know you’re the thought leader in the field.
  3. Lobbying a public official and having many of your supporters join in.
  4. Finding someone who needs housing right now, helping them obtain it, and watching them sing your praises online.
  5. Getting on the radar screen of people who might never have seen your name any other way.

Whether you use Twitter search to gather information or also tweet to take part in a conversation, it could be a powerful tool for your nonprofit.

Are you already using Twitter at your nonprofit?  What advice would you give an agency that wants to start using Twitter?

Who Actually Sees What You Post on Social Media?

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social media

When your organization posts text or photos or video on social media, who sees what you posted?  Answer: It depends on which social media you’re using.

Know the differences so you can invest your social media time wisely.

Facebook is huge, but the percentage of your followers who see your Facebook posts is small. If you have less than 10,000 page likes, on average, it’s about 7%.  That’s right, 93% of your followers won’t see a particular post! (And the problem is even worse the more followers you attract.)

Why?  Because Facebook doesn’t show everybody everything.

Let’s say that you have a follower named Sarah Thompson.  What will Sarah see in her News Feed (the main page where people spend their time on Facebook)?

  • She is more likely to see your story if she has recently liked, commented upon, or shared another of your posts.
  • If she likes text-only posts, those are your posts that she’s more likely to see.  If she likes photos, she’s more likely to see your posts that contain photos, and so on.
  • She’s more likely to see your post if other people have liked, commented, or shared, and less likely if they have complained about it.

Plus, Facebook keeps tweaking its algorithm (the rules by which it decides which of your posts get seen), sometimes from week to week.  The only guaranteed way to get seen is to pay Facebook for the privilege.

Bottom line: If you are a small organization, you will need exceptional content over a long period of time to get your Facebook posts seen.

Twitter is different from Facebook: it shows every tweet you tweet to everyone who follows you.  The trouble is that there are so many messages on Twitter, and they all rush by so fast, Sarah may not notice your message!

You will need to tweet the same basic message multiple times to give Sarah a better chance of actually reading it.  Again, plan on taking time to build a loyal following.

Google+ gives you the chance to target your message to the people you choose. You can send to specific communities (where everyone will receive it) or to circles that you have created (where they will receive it only if they have followed you back).

Check carefully to see whether the people you want to reach actually use Google+. Is Sarah there?  If not, she’s never going to see that brilliant article you posted!

LinkedIn gives you three ways to post: by updating your status, by participating in a group, or by writing a long-form post for LinkedIn Pulse (essentially, blogging on LinkedIn).

  • Status updates potentially get seen by everyone who has connected with you (unlike status updates on Facebook, and more like on Google+), but they tend to get pushed way down the page quickly (as on Twitter).
  • Groups allow you to post to a more selected audience…but it depends on them to check messages from the group and to click on yours.  Will Sarah pay the attention and take the time to open your post?
  • Posts are more likely to be seen by people who have connected with you, but they are available for everyone to see. All these ways of putting content on LinkedIn will be there and easily accessible to anyone who comes looking for you.

We could go on adding examples from YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., but the point would be the same:

Know where your audience is on social media.

Know what it takes to get your message seen on that particular medium.

Take time to build a loyal audience–so THEY come looking for YOU.

Social Media for Nonprofits: How Do I Keep Up?

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You’re an organization that promotes the social good.  You’re on social media.  Why doesn’t it feel social?

drinking out of a fire hose

This is not what you want to do on social media!

Probably because you’re trying so hard to keep up.  Following other people on social media is proverbially like “drinking out of a fire hose.”  Feeding your followers’ hunger for content is like running a short-order kitchen.

When do you sit down and actually talk?

Automate Tasks, So You Can Be More Personal

You want to use social media to a) get to know your supporters and b) have them get to know and love you better.  That takes a personal touch.

Paradoxically, the way to get personal is to automate more tasks.  Think of it this way: you have only so much time, right?  How would you rather spend that time: scheduling posts (which is something a machine can do), or having a real conversation with someone who’s interested in your group?

Social Media Tasks to Automate

There are certain social media tasks that lend themselves easily to automation.  Adam Stetzer, President & Co-Founder of HubShout, lists a few do’s and don’ts.  DO:

  • Automatically share every blog post to multiple social media platforms.
  • Use software to schedule posts so your feeds look alive when you are asleep.
  • Find strong sources of specific content about your mission that your audience will enjoy, that you won’t have to create.

Don’t Automate These Social Media Tasks

  • Highly-customized content that complements the news about your issues mentioned above, but shows the personality and human-side of the organization.
  • “Thank you’s”: When a human reaches out to you, find a way to build the contact into a relationship with a highly customized (i.e., human) response.
  • Refollows: Don’t follow every follower. Many are machines and bring no value.
  • Retweets: Automation will reduce the quality of social media presence.

Will you put these tips to use in 2015?

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