Krista Neher of Boot Camp Digital shared 7 Biggest Social Media Mistakes at 2016’s SummitUp marketing conference. (Don’t worry, you can apply for the free training online!) I’ve seen nonprofits make all seven mistakes, but there’s two changes I made right away to my social media posts at my nonprofit job.
1. Keep it short!
You’re followers can understand pretty quickly what you’re talking about, especially when you use emojis and other visuals.
Here’s what our posts looked like a few years ago:
And more recently:
You don’t even have to use visuals to get a full message across quickly. You can know three different things from this quick post since text in the link’s appearance provides new information in each line:
You can edit the meta on Facebook before you post a link: 2014 Tutorial.
Compelling visual content seems intimidating or expensive to create, but free, user-friendly tools like Canva, PicMonkey, and Piktochart provide templates that you can alter to match your branding.
But where do you find ideas for your short, visual content?
2. Find inspiration on Pinterest
I didn’t think of this before Neher’s workshop!
I pin when ideas for party planning, cooking, even to understand why my cat is behaving strangely (read: all the time, really.)
Now I also search for keywords relating to my nonprofit’s mission to see what other motivating or witty content people share on a highly visual platform. Your nonprofit might focus in heavy issues, but look for images that create an emotional reaction to foster engagement while continuing the conversations around your mission and brand.
Shoes for the Shoeless is great at visually creating positive feelings around negative issues on Facebook.
Short. Visual. Emotional. And they didn’t even have to use a child’s face.
Do you know of another nonprofit that is doing this well?
