Social Media for Non-Profit & Small Business

You know who’s a fan of social media for non-profits and small businesses? This girl, right here. Having worked with several non-profits and small businesses throughout my working career has taught me to become very budget and trend savvy. It is vital for non-profits to take advantage of the resources right at their fingertips!

But, social media for non-profits can be tricky. Which avenues do you pursue? What do you write? What the heck is a hash tag? Who keeps following me? My best advice is: copy the cool kids. It’s awesome to be an early adopter, but the products being used out there are the ones that work. I use Facebook because over 600 million people use Facebook. I use WordPress for blogging because it’s easy to use. Why would you make life hard for yourself? Don’t reinvent the wheel.

It can all sound a little overwhelming, but it isn’t if you learn to harness the power of these tools correctly. For non-profits this is essential and the goal should always be to leave a social media footprint with all of your online marketing activities driving participants and donors to your website.

After years of using social media, I’ve definitely made mistakes and learned a lot about the interaction capabilities of these tools. Below are 12 tips to increase your social media footprint and harness the exponential power of social media.

1. The Interaction Economy is replacing the Experience Economy as an anticipatory approach to creating customer value. Interacting with your customers will have them coming back.
2. Research all of the social media sites out there. Find the ones that work best for you. If you made children’s clothing, you wouldn’t market to engineers.
3. SEO, Search Engine Optimization (helping those pesky search engine spiders find your site and rank it at the top) is important but needs to be combined with a solid plan for Search Engine Visibility (SEV).
4. Get to know what your competitors are doing in the social media sphere and read what social media pros have to say. They know what they’re talking about.
5. Tagging. Tag in Facebook to mention clients, customers, sites or vendors (use the @ symbol in front of the name you wish to tag). Tag in Twitter to spread the word to the Twitterverse (tag with the @ symbol to mention a specific person/group and # to tag a concept). Tag your blogs to increase search possibilities. Tag (and title well) videos to YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
6. Social media in the short term doesn’t work. You have to be in it to win it. Be persistent, consistent and committed.
7. Read about technology. It changes. Often. Like, everyday.
8. Interactions count. Every like, comment, Re Tweet: they all count.
9. Who you are and where you come from matters. People want to know they are dealing with real people, not machines.
10. Use Google Alerts to see who is talking about your business and anything related to your business.
11. Any non-profit can participate in social media, but not everyone actually does. That is to your advantage.
12. If you have a spare hour or two each day to surf the net, watch TV or stare into space, you have more than ample time to commit to implementing and using social media for your business.

How long have you been using social media for your non-profit or small business? What have you found works best? We’d love to hear!

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