Social Media for Nonprofits:

Top 4 Do’s and Don’ts

Your nonprofit’s social media outreach is a powerful way to share your impact, increase trust and credibility, and highlight constituents quickly and easily. Instead of making social media an afterthought, make it an integral part of your overall engagement strategy. When you do, people will connect with your organization and in the process become powerful allies and advocates for your cause.Here are the top four social media do’s and don’ts—plus the “ultimate do”—to help you build engagement with every status update and tweet.

#1 Add Images NOT Links

Do include both a link and an image to garner lots of likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs. (Check out the example on this page from Charity Water’s Facebook wall.) Avoid using stock images. Photos don’t need to be super high quality; they just need to be interesting. Gather snapshots from events or in the field, for instance, and develop a good backlog of images you can use with various types of content.

Don’t include just a link in your Facebook posts.

#2 Say No to Repeats

• Don’t post the same type of content over and over again.

Do post a variety of content on all channels: blog posts, photo galleries, videos. People consume media in different ways. Mix up your media and content—tell a story, ask for donations, announce an event, etc

#3 Respond to the Community

• Don’t ignore comments and tweets.

Do engage with your followers. Answer questions. Respond to feedback. Wish donors a happy birthday or even happy anniversary for, say, their fifth year as a supporter. Thank volunteers by name after a work party. We all love to be acknowledged, and we often respond by sharing those posts and telling our friends.

#4 Keep Social Media Simple

Don’t try to manage eight different platforms.

Do focus on just one to three platforms—and test everything. Keep it simple. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to start. Post different types of content to see what gets the most likes, shares, retweets, and comments. Learn where your audiences are, optimize your content for each platform, and make every post sharable, engaging, and unique.

Bonus: Share Everything

The Ultimate Do: Above all, make sure every post is sharable, engaging, and unique. If it isn’t all three of these things, don’t post it until it is.

Once you get the traffic, you’ll need a customized donation page. Check out our article Set up a customized donation page to find out more.

Adapted from Network for Good’s Nonprofit 911 webinar “How to Use Content to Boost Donations” with Taylor Corrado from HubSpot. Download the full webinar here.