Consider these ideas for ways to increase online engagement without breaking your budget:
1. Highlight a donor of the day or donor of the week.
These simple bits of appreciation can be powerful for building connections with your communities, and they can often make for attention-grabbing visual content. (Bonus: The people you highlight will share with their friends.)
2. Interact with relevant pages and profiles.
In addition to building community by highlighting your donors, you can also connect with those nonprofits and companies that support your mission. Stay involved with their updates and shares by “liking,” retweeting, sharing and commenting. It’s great for community-building and helps boost your visibility.
3. Tweet to landing pages with specific requests.
You can bring clean water like this to someone in need with one $30 donation right now at http://t.co/ZZeKOfhWfC http://pic.twitter.com/C5RD2hheFY
— charity: water (@charitywater) June 15, 2015
If you have payments enabled on your website, send social media traffic back to your site and to specific landing pages. Create five, 10, 20, or more landing pages, each with a specific ask; then compose a social media message to accompany each page.
[RELATED: Attend the Big 5 Social Media Boot Camp and learn to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram to get huge results.]
4. Create behind-the-scenes content.
Nonprofits by nature are a bit more open than traditional business. Take advantage by sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses: backstage at events, inside planning sessions, around the office, etc.
5. Create and share a simple crowdfunding campaign.
As an alternative to events or dinners, you can create a simple crowdfunding page (Crowdrise is a great spot) and share this with your social media followers, asking for a quick, easy donation.
6. Encourage peer-to-peer requests.
Tools like Classy make it possible for your supporters to set up their own fundraising pages. They can share these pages with their own followers, encouraging strong one-to-one support.
7. Post a thank-you message on a sponsor’s page.
Thanking those who help make your work possible—from donors to employees to sponsors—is a great way to fill the appreciation element of your strategy. Sponsors’ pages can be great places to engage, as they probably have a strong following as well. Share a thank-you on their page, and add one to your page, too.
8. Include an image in your tweets.
From Noland Hoshino:
Twitter is like looking out the window of a fast moving train. If you insert a “billboard” (photo or graphic image) tweet, people will notice it.
(We’ve seen up to double the engagement with this strategy.)
9. Ask questions in your social media posts.
These encourage conversation with your community and prompt more interactions and responses.
10. Share your content more than once.
Here are some simple ideas from Lauren Girardin:
Share just the headline, write a tweet in an alternate engaging format (e.g. ask a question, quote a juicy bit), add an image, try a new hashtag, share at a different time of day or on the weekend, or add ICYMI (in case you missed it).
11. Track your social media mentions.
Here are some great tools for social media monitoring . Mention is a favorite of ours.
12. Organize accounts into Twitter lists.
You can build Twitter lists for just about anything: VIP supporters, sponsors, press, influencers, partners, fellow nonprofits, etc. If you choose, any Twitter list can be made private.
13. Use Twitter lists for research.
Look through the lists of your followers to find relevant people and accounts to follow.
14. Monitor and analyze those who follow you.
Keep an eye on the new accounts following you. They might have great influence in an important area to you or have many followers you can engage. Social Rank is a simple yet powerful tool for sorting Twitter followers.
15. Enlist a group of supporters to engage with your content.
If you’re just getting started on social media, you might not be able to get great engagement. To avoid the empty look and feel of a new account, encourage a small and active group of supporters to engage with your content.
16. Find and engage with influencers in your area.
Followerwonk shows you analysis of your Twitter followers, including a map with a breakdown of where each follower is. Keep clicking the map to get more and more details about the location (country > state > city). To access this report, log in at Followerwonk and choose an Analyze report, with your @username and “analyze their followers.”
17. Discover the connections of your team.
Tap into the networking aspect of social media (on LinkedIn in particular) by looking at the connections of those in your organization.
18. Use closed groups on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Chat internally with your team on LinkedIn or Facebook to help share resources or ideas. It’s also great for connecting with a team of volunteers or a board of advisors.
19. Reserve your name in all social media platforms.
KnowEm is a great place to visit to see which social networks you’ve yet to claim.
20. Create your own Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia pages can be great for social sharing and for helping manage your brand online. (They’re pretty great for SEO, too.) To create a page, go to the entry creation page at Wikipedia, and once you’ve created the entry, check back often and track any changes.
21. Allow social media as a communication preference for your members.
Many people (millennials in particular) prefer that notifications or messages come via social media. You can add these folks to a group or list and message them directly when you might otherwise send an email.
22. When someone registers at your site, ask for a social media profile.
This can be a simple extra field in your signup form (or for the especially tech-savvy, you can add social media sign-in to your forms). Once you have the social media info, you can connect with this person and store his or her social media info in your donor database.
23. Offer text-to-give and tweet-to-give.
As social media goes mobile, your payments can, too. Text-to-give is a slick way to help people donate quickly. Same goes for those seeking to donate directly via Twitter. Register your nonprofit at Charitweet to enable simple, micro-donations through Twitter.
24. Add social media PR contacts to your list.
If you’re looking for press coverage for your nonprofit, instead of going the traditional news route, you can find many great contacts online, including online-only publications and journalists who are primed for your topic. Some smart searches (“PR,” “[your topic],” “[your area],” etc.) can reveal leads worth following.
25. Have a social media person on your board.
Find someone who knows their stuff on social media and can help with formulating strategies or making plans should something go wrong on social media.
26. Schedule routine drive-bys of your social media accounts.
Fifteen-minute checks in the morning, afternoon and evening may be enough to catch up on what’s been happening on your online accounts.
27. Find and participate in Twitter chats.
Share your expertise, and connect with like-minded people. You can search in a chat tool such as Twubs to find a relevant Twitter chat on your topic area.
28. Respond to everyone.
Responding completely is one way to help set yourself apart on social media. If possible, respond in a timely manner, typically 24 hours or less (or a few hours or less on Twitter).
29. Ask about nonprofit discounts for your favorite tools.
Many online tools offer discounts for nonprofit businesses. Check out these tools, for starters:
1. Crowdrise: Crowdfunding platform ideally suited for nonprofit fundraising
2. Amazon Smile: Set up your organization to get donations via Amazon purchases
3. Classy, First Giving, Blackbaud: Peer-to-peer fundraising
4. Mention : Social media monitoring
5. Buffer: Social media scheduling and management
6. Google for Nonprofits: Discounts on products for nonprofits
7. Piryx: Web payments for nonprofits
8. Bloomerang: Fundraising management and software
9. Harvest and Donate.ly: Online payments and donations for your website
10. Charitweet: Quick and simple microdonations with a tweet
Kevan Lee is the director of marketing at Buffer. A version of this article originally appeared on the company’s blog.(Image via)
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