Tips for charity and social enterprise social media posts

Charity and social enterprise social media posts

Most charities and social enterprises I come across have little time to be fully active on social media and in most cases can’t outsource this with budget restrictions. They are often trying to do this alongside a hundred other tasks. They may also not be comfortable or knowledgeable enough to put things out into the public domain.

This guide will give some tips on how to make each post more engaging as well as tips on how to focus and save time while doing it.

1. Give Value

I know this might sound obvious but knowing what your customer will engage with or care about is most of the challenge. You can look at historic activity and engagement with posts or profile your customers to work out things that your particular customers engage with.

Organisations that just post about what they are doing will not engage as many people as possible.

Thinking about WIIFM (What’s in it for me) from your customers point of view will help guide this. Are you informing them about an event that will be useful for them or fun? Are you giving them some news that will be of interest? Are you telling them about the people you have helped with their donations or potential donations? Is it something they can use in their everyday lives?

You don’t have to have 100% of your posts like this but aim for about 80%, the rest you can directly promote what you do.

2. Set Goals

It’s no use just posting out for the sake of it, it needs to have a clear purpose. Set clear goals. Set goals for each post, week or month depending on your campaigns. Setting a number of likes is a false economy, you need to set it on outcomes, did someone purchase something, donate, share it on or engage with you in some way.

3. Plan in advance

If you plan in advance you will save time and have much more effective campaigns.

First, work out how long you want to spend on social media posts per month. Say it is 4 hours you have then you can plan in about 8 – 10 posts for the month.

Remember you don’t have to write all your own content and sharing others can be just as useful.

You can schedule these in tools like https://buffer.com or https://hootsuite.com/ for the month which is then out of sight and you can get on with your hundreds of other tasks.

So you don’t have to spend ages thinking about what to post every month you can use a template which will make all of this as efficient and impactful as possible.

Here is an example:

4. Be Human

If you have a tone of voice as part of your brand strategy it is important to stick to that consistently throughout your communications. If you don’t have something like this set then just be yourself, people engage with people more than they do robots (most of the time) so don’t write robotic posts, give them personality. Using tools like http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ can help with type of voice and structure of any writing.

5. Quality

This one is simple, we will talk about visuals below but these have to be high quality. The other one to pay keen attention to is spelling, people really do notice this.

6. Visuals

Try to use as many relevant visuals as possible, if it is a people story try use pictures or videos of them. Using tools like https://www.canva.com or https://pablo.buffer.com/ will really help as they even resize the images for the right social platform.

Using short videos and Gifs are really engaging and at least get people to stop as they are scrolling through.

7. Ask

Always ask for something, you don’t get if you don’t ask. It doesn’t have to be for donations or to buy something you could simply ask for them to share a post or watch a video or read an article you wrote.

8. Use relevant tags and hashtags

Tag people who are involved in the post  in any way, it will encourage them to share with their followers or pages. Use relevant hashtags – here are some for the 3rd sector –

1. #volunteer

2. #(add in the area you want people to engage ie #Leeds)

3. #donate

4. #change

5. #SocEnt

6. #nonprofit

7. #dogood

8. #charity

9. #fundraising

10. #philanthropy

11. #SocialGood

Also – there are a number of specific day ones as well, here are some that might be relevant for our sector.

#MondayMotivation #MotivationMonday #MeatlessMonday #MondayRun #MindfulMonday #MondayFunday

#CharityTuesday #TransformationTuesday #TipTuesday #GoodNewsTues

#WisdomWednesday #WellnessWednesday

#ThrowbackThursday (or #TBT) #ThankfulThursday #ThoughtfulThursday #ThursdayThoughts

#FlashBackFriday #FearlessFriday #FeatureFriday #FitnessFriday #FridayFun #FactFriday

If you follow these simple tips you can do more with less with your social media.

If you want to use Agency For Good for 5 hours of FREE marketing consultancy for your non-profit please get in touch here.

During these sessions we can help with your social media planning or even provide a more in depth training session for you or your team.

Here at Agency For Good we help organisations spend much less time and money while driving more impact through better, more ethical use of digital.

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