Social media for NGOs
You must thank the Almighty (or atleast the technocrats) if you are an NGO that the social media is out there for you. Social media offers high ROI with low investments when compared with its other counterparts, such as PPC, email marketing and banner advertising. Here’s a checklist of best practices for NGOs on the social media to garner maximum profits with new age networking.
Various activisms have been successful due to their presence on social media. If you are an NGO and you are not present on social media, it simply means that you are spending more time, energies and money on reaching out to people. Networking, or even communicating, with people through the use of social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, etc. for NGOs yields better ROI when compared with other relatively older practices of online marketing. The need is to be define your goals, target groups and platforms clearly.
Whatever is your online goal, you must be able to get people engaged and get noticed at the right time. You need to first identify:
- Your social media strategy
- Your short- and long-term goals
- Your target groups – supporters, volunteers, donors, messengers
- The geographical area that you want to reach out to
- The activities that you can do both online and offline
- Your message
Then you need to understand the strengths of the various social media platforms:
- Facebook pages help you post news, pictures and even videos. It’s the most used social networking website on the web today but identifying and reaching out to the target groups remains a challenge. Best for finding volunteers and messengers.
- Twitter is the second largest social networking website and you may post updates (and pics too) for your followers. Networking with the target group is relatively easier but demands more expertise. Suited for your all types of TG.
- LinkedIn is a professional networking website and almost all of your TGs for fundraising would be here. Reaching out to all of them is easier and requires lesser technical expertise too when compared with Facebook and Twitter.
- Pinterest is slowly becoming the one stop for posting collages, infographics and even pictures. Each item posted is called a pin and can be re-pinned (or re-posted in their accounts) by others. Mostly used by women.
- Flickr and YouTube are the most important images and videos hosting websites. You cannot ignore to be there. Vimeo is another video hosting website.
- Wikipedia allows people to start and contribute to articles which are of interest to general people. You may write articles about the places, companies and people.
Once you have identified the above you need to understand that social media is there to complement what you do offline. It’s not something which can be done singularly. Your messages, creatives and campaigns need to be in sync of your marketing collaterals and your offline activities. The platforms mentioned above are all free and you may also require a blog and a website apart from the above ones. Given that here’s a list of things that you must do on the social media:
- The branding, logo, colour combination, backgrounds and display pictures should all remain the same throughout the channels so that you look identifiable and professional.
- Make usernames and URLs with your brand name so that people can easily reach you by searching your name.
- Most of the people on social media understand images. Your posts on various social media platforms should be image heavy and led visually, may be by an infographic.
- Don’t just post images, use text and videos too.
- Avoid automated responses. A personal touch really matters. Try to engage people yourself.
- Thank people for liking, following or networking with you.
- Engage people by asking them how they feel about your cause and sharing the same to their friends. Further ask them to volunteer.
- Encourage discussions on Facebook and Twitter through the use of YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Flickr.
- Try to keep different logos for different campaigns so that people may wisely choose the ones they like to get associated with.
- Keep the conversation going. Don’t just forget posting on social media channels someday.