John Killoran, Chairman of Clover Leaf Solutions, joins Thread with this guest blog post about to use social media to grow the visibility of your organization.
John Killoran is an inventor, entrepreneur, and the Chairman of Clover Leaf Solutions, a national lab services company. He currently leads Clover Leaf’s investment in Snowball Fundraising, an online fundraising platform for nonprofit organizations.
Snowball was one of John’s first public innovations; it’s a fundraising platform that offers text-to-give, online giving, events, and peer-to-peer fundraising tools for nonprofits. By making giving simple, Snowball increases the donations that these organizations can raise online. The Snowball effect is real! John founded Snowball in 2011. Now, it serves over 7,000 nonprofits and is the #1 nonprofit fundraising platform.
Social media is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal to grow your impact. Make the most of it with these five social media strategies for success.
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for growing the visibility of your organization. Especially with the rise of platforms like TikTok, we’ve seen how brands and organizations have gained popular simply for creating relatable or humorous content that goes viral. They achieved success because they really understood their audience and what would resonate with them.
On these fast-moving platforms, understanding and catering to your audience is crucial. In this way, social media marketing is similar to using donor segmentation in any of your communications. Instead of writing a target and personalized email, you’re just creating relatable and specific social media content for your unique audience.
According to Double the Donation, 39% of donors said they were most inspired to give by social media. And because social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, it’s crucial to learn how to best utilize it to grow your donor base and your impact. To help you improve your social media strategy, we’re sharing five ways to grow on social media:
1. Create a schedule.
2. Write powerful copy.
3. Don’t be afraid of video.
4. Create community.
5. Focus on calls to action.
Social media has grown to become one of the most impactful nonprofit marketing tools out there and is only growing in its influence. Use our strategies and tips to maximize your success and grow your donor base.
1. Create A Schedule
Creating social media content can be very time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to make trending content to increase your chances of going viral. It’s too easy to fall behind and be scrambling to create last-minute content. When this happens, your content often ends up not being the best quality.
To avoid this stressful shuffle, you and your team should create a content calendar and stick to it. A content calendar allows you to plan out what you want to post, on what platforms, when, and with what caption and hashtags. It can take a lot of different forms, from a simple document outlining all of your plans to an actual calendar with posts assigned to specific days.
Planning ahead means you can start creating your content ahead of time and have it ready to go when it’s time to post. Creating a schedule will help you:
– Maintain consistency.
– Prepare content ahead of time.
– Vary and space out your content.
– Avoid getting overwhelmed during the busy year-end fundraising season.
Start by identifying the campaigns and events you need to market and any other brand-building or informative posts you want to make. Then, schedule different types of posts, assign them to team members, and fill in your calendar with drafts of ready-to-post content.
2. Write Powerful Copy
Whether you’re writing an Instagram caption, a tweet, or scripting a TikTok video, your content should be engaging and tell a story. The more powerful your copy is, the more likely it is to actually drive your audience to engage with your content.
All stories need a few essential elements. First, identify the main conflict (or the problem you’re working to solve), a protagonist who is the central character in the story, and a resolution. By describing your conflict in greater detail, you can get supporters emotionally invested in your cause. At the end of the story, tell supporters how their help can make a difference in resolving the conflict.
Even though you’re telling a story, you don’t want your copy to be too long. Social media typically favors short and snappy captions that get right to the point. Be concise and direct to convey your message in the most effective way possible.
3. Don’t Be Afraid of Video
Video is having a major moment on social media. If your organization hasn’t explored creating video content yet, now is the time to start.
You might be worried that you don’t have the resources to create high-quality videos, but there’s no need to worry. With the rise of platforms like TikTok, short videos filmed on iPhones have become the norm. There is absolutely still a time and place for highly-produced video content, but that’s no longer the only option for achieving success with videos.
To get started with video on TikTok or with Reels on Instagram, you should first spend some time familiarizing yourself with the type of content that does well on these platforms and the in-app creation tools that you’ll be using.
Here are some best practices and tips for creating TikTok or Reels video content:
– Keep videos short. While you can go up to 60 seconds on Reels and even three minutes on TikTok, most videos still perform best when they are about 15 seconds long.
– Use trending sounds when you can. Even if it’s only playing softly in the background, using a sound that’s currently trending on the platform can help boost your visibility. Sometimes these are songs, other times they’re audio clips that add context to a trend.
– Hook your audience in the beginning. Because there is so much content on apps like TikTok, it’s important to grab people’s attention immediately, especially if you want them to watch past 12 seconds.
– Don’t be afraid to have fun. Even if your cause is very serious, that doesn’t mean your brand can’t be fun or engaging. Get creative with your content!
– Make trends relevant to your content. This is really the trick to going viral on TikTok. You need to follow the format of trending videos but make them relevant to your subject matter. For example, if people are using a specific trending sound to share a video with a surprising piece of information about themselves, just making a video with a surprising fact isn’t enough. You have to use the same sound, and follow the transitions or specific sequence of clips that make up other videos in this trend, but with your own surprising fact.
There is a bit of a learning curve to platforms like TikTok, so be patient with yourself. Because creating videos and keeping up with trends can be time-intensive, you might consider hiring someone for a social media position. Or, you could find a volunteer who wants to gain experience creating social media content.
4. Create Community
Pushing out content is only one of the purposes of being on social media. Remember, social media platforms were first conceived as a way for people to interact and create community — not create or advertise content.
There are several ways you can help create a community for your supporters online:
– Ask them questions. Stories and the captions of your content are a great place to ask questions. This will boost your engagement rate and visibility on users’ social media feeds while creating connections with your supporters.
– Respond to messages. When supporters respond to your stories or DM you, make sure to answer them in a timely manner with a helpful response!
– Give them a peek behind the curtain. Use your stories to let your supporters get to know your staff members and volunteers, and better understand the work that you do.
– Share their content. Encourage your supporters to tag you in any stories or content they create that’s relevant to your organization. When they do it, make sure to share their content on your own story.
– Create a Facebook group. In addition to all of these other steps, you can create a dedicated Facebook group for your supporters to join. Use your Facebook group, to talk about different topics, share resources, post news, and more.
No matter what you post, the most important way to interact with your supporters and create community is to show up consistently and be relatable.
5. Focus on Calls to Action
All social media platforms have unique features that can greatly boost your impact if you use them properly. While some social media posts are primarily focused on building your brand or creating community, your ultimate goal is to drive users to take specific actions, like donating.
When it comes to engagement on social media and growing your following, there are big benefits to encouraging users to take actions within the social media platform itself, besides making a donation. The more that users interact with your posts through actions like saving, sharing, liking, and commenting, the more that signals to the algorithm that your post is valuable and should be shown to more people. So, whether you’re encouraging people to share your post or click the link in your bio, there is always a benefit to including a call to action. A call to action simply asks your supporters to do something, whether it’s to comment on your post, or to head to the link in your profile to donate.
One of Snowball’s top tips for boosting conversion rates is to create excellent calls to action. Your most important calls to action, which take users off-platform, can bring them to your website, to your donation page, or even to sign up for your email list. The more compelling your call to action, the more time users will spend interacting with your content or your actual website. Here are a few features on different social media platforms that can help you convert followers into donors:
– Instagram’s donate sticker. Encouraging users to add a donate sticker to their stories can drive donations to you through a form of peer-to-peer fundraising. When a user shares a donate sticker, they connect it to a specific nonprofit (yours, in this case) and their followers can click to donate.
– Story interaction stickers. There are other types of stickers — like polls, questions, and sliders — that you can use on Instagram stories. Using these types of stickers encourages engagement and get followers to interact for longer. The longer they interact, the more the algorithm will show your content to them in their feeds.
– Retweet/Share. Another important call to action besides donating is asking your supporters to share your content. This can help boost visibility for your cause in general or help solicit more donations for a specific campaign.
– Save. This feature is not available on all platforms and has different levels of importance. However, asking users to save your post, at least on Instagram, is helpful for indicating the value of your content.
– Comment. Asking your supporters questions or asking them to tag a friend in the comments is a great way to grow engagement on a post. On Twitter, asking users to reply is similar to commenting.
There’s often no real need to encourage users to “like” your post because it’s one of the least valuable indicators of value for social media algorithms and it’s already the most used interaction. However, a high like count can show other viewers that your content is popular.
The most important thing to understand is that each platform has specific features and actions that you should focus on using. Doing so will boost your engagement rates on the platform and will help you more effectively drive traffic to your website and donation form as you show up in your supporter’s feeds more and more.
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Social media is a crucial component of any digital campaign and should be a part of all of your marketing campaigns, even if they’re not entirely digital. With the five strategies we shared, you’ll be in good shape to make the most of your digital presence and start growing your following on social media.