Social Media for Your Small Organization

Posted on April 25, 2018 in Associations

Using social media can be quite intimidating for smaller organizations, so this week we offer tips, tricks, and best practices commonly used. Reaching more members and potential members through social media results in an increase in new member signups, event registrations, engagement and more!

In society today it’s becoming not only important but necessary for your organization to have a strong online presence. This doesn’t mean you need to have every social media account they have to offer, but to make sure the few social media accounts you do have are being used correctly and making an impact.

The Yoast blog is a great place to go when you’re in need of some advice, tips, or best practice information concerning a wide range of business topics. We found a great post called Social Media For Small Business Owners written by Michiel Heljmans. We summarize his post below which offers a bunch of awesome information about social media and how to use it for your small business.

Social Media for Your Small Organization

As we all know social media is a large portion of an organizations marketing strategy. But for small organizations and associations sometimes it’s hard to know where to start.

When figuring out your organization’s social media strategy the first question is what platforms should we use?

It’s important to keep your organizations demographic in mind, LinkedIn vs. Instagram for example.
Ask your members what social media they prefer and use the most.
Make a decision and get going!

Now once you’ve decided what platform to use:

Start creating and uploading relevant content. There is always something to share!
If you are good at what you do, you’ll have projects, testimonials, pictures, and quotes worth sharing. No need to write new blog posts every day, simply find something you’re proud of and share it.
Give it time, nothing grows overnight. stay consistent with an uploading schedule so your members and followers know what to expect.

Tips and Tricks for Social Media

Twitter

One of the best ways for people to find your social media accounts is when you use hashtags. For example hashtag your city, #Calgary, or hashtags something that would make your content more easily searchable, such as #nonprofit.
If you are looking for a way to get involved in relevant, local conversations, you should try the advanced search option on Twitter. It allows you to search for any subject you like, in the area you want. See screenshot below.

Facebook

Make sure your company is on Facebook! Facebook is continually one of the most used and searched for local organizations etc. Facebook has 1.94 billion monthly active users and 1.28 billion daily active users on average.
Promote your page to your personal friends, get likes, and share updates and photos. Note that for sales posts (“Buy our product!”), you have a better chance of success if you ‘boost‘ your post just a little bit.
Facebook also has great tools in place so you are able to track how your organization’s page is doing and how many people your page and posts are reaching. Facebook Page Insights Explained.

Instagram

Sharing photos is something any small organization can do and is a great way to reach a bigger audience.
Take photos at any events, conferences, etc. For example take photos to promote you weekly member yoga class, or walk/run fundraiser.
Take more than one because these photos are a great way to promote these events in the future!
Use hashtags! Instagram has a hashtag for literally everything! Use hashtags relevant to your organization, for example: #nonprofit, #fundraiser, #calgary, #yycsmallassociation, #exploreyyc, etc.

Instagram also has analytics! This is something not too many people are usually aware of. There are a ton of iOS and Android apps for Instagram, and a lot of these are apps that give you stats.

Iconosquare is a great app for organization analytics and has a free trial, and after that, it costs you from $49/yr (per IG account) up to $499/yr. Key differences between the packages are these:

The cheapest package doesn’t allow for hashtag monitoring
The more expensive ones add competition monitoring
Comments will be tracked for the last 5, 15 or 30 media
The most expensive one includes photo and video contests

Successful Social Media Strategies

Some advice from Michiel the writer of the article Social Media For Small Business Owners:

Post engaging content, because that is the best way to build an audience. Sounds simple, but it is pretty hard. Don’t be afraid to experiment here. Usually, personal stories lead to the most and best engagement. Having said that, Yoast office life pictures on social media often lead to questions about the awesome features of Yoast SEO Premium (for instance). Keep an open mind and help any customer with whatever question they have, related or not. The engagement counts, not the subject of your post.

Your employees are your brand ambassadors on social media. They love your company, enjoy working there and are most likely to share a lot of your social content if not all. Your employees create that local snowball effect. After all, most of their connections on Facebook are probably/usually living in the same geographical area as you. Acknowledge this, and stay aware of the value of these ‘in-house’ shares.