Training Your Staff to Effectively Use Social Media Part II

Social media is as much a part of the business world as spreadsheets and board meetings. You get to the office, grab a cup of coffee, check your e-mails, and prepare for the other details of the day. With a solid foundation of online communication for connecting with donors, vendors, and colleagues, it is important to have a strategy to make the most of your time. In the last post, we covered a few basics to using social media in the workplace. Here are a few more:

Allocate Your Time and Keep Up

The speed of social media is remarkably fast. You can post or tweet a comment in the morning and by afternoon you could scroll down four pages before you come across it again. The average lifespan of a tweet is 2.8 hours and a Facebook post is 3.2 hours. With such a fast-paced medium, the best way to use this resource is in short bursts. Don’t spend hours constructing and reading messages that are just a flash in the pan. Create a well constructed update or announcement, post it, and move on. It can be so easy to lose yourself in the myriad of comments that are stated, so beware of the black hole steals away precious moments of your day.

Know Where to Find Your Audience

Be a laser beam, not a flashlight. Depending on your time and staffing levels, figure out where your donors are and focus on a few social media sites. This can be a trial and error process, but you can be pretty sure that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are safe bets. If you have time, you might want to consider MySpace, Google+, or Tagged.

Monitor Your Output, Discover What Works For You

One problem that many nonprofits are facing is the amount of noise that is on the web. How do you stand out? This is where quality and quantity have to work hand in hand. Each piece needs to be concise, well constructed and have a nugget of valuable information in it so it will keep your donors coming back. Next, you need to monitor your output; too many posts and your donors will ignore your messages. Too few and you’ll be out of sight, out of mind. The actual number varies between the many articles that I’ve read online. Some say that you should post between one to three a day to get more viewers. Others say between three to five times a week so you don’t bombard your supporters. I tend to agree with a few times a week, but it honestly depends on how many followers or ‘likes’ you have in your social networks, how you interact with your donors, and the events that are going on in your organization during that week.

Through social media you can get your name out faster and with less financial investment than any other resource out there. From getting volunteers to participate to increasing online fundraising, teaching your staff how to manage social media networks can boost your organization’s popularity and donation numbers.