Social Media Best Practices: How to Maximize Your Nonprofit’s Potential

According to a recent Hootsuite study, only 20% of nonprofits feel confident that they are fulfilling their social media potential. In comparison, 80% feel a gap in their social media strategy. Your social media presence can ignite an engaging and supportive community when leveraged with the proper steps. Let’s look at actionable steps you can take with Tapp Network Marketing Solutions to help your nonprofit maximize your social media potential.

Social Media Best Practices: How to Maximize Your Nonprofit’s Potential

1. Understanding Your Goals and Audience

It’s important to identify your organization’s goals. How extensive is your reach? Are you limited to certain geographies or communities? Do you want to increase your reach or enhance community engagement? Make your goals as specific as possible. It’s beneficial to set measurable achievements that you can track. Try to remember to set goals that are realistic within your budget and bandwidth.

Identifying your target audience before posting on social media is crucial. A great way to determine a target audience is by utilizing personas. A persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. This persona will indicate how said customer may come across your organization, their habits, goals, and struggles. With the help of Tapp Network’s expertise, we can help you along this process to discover a clearer vision of who, what, when, and where.

2. Determine Your Content Strategy

Once you feel confident in your goals and target audience, it’s time to create a content strategy. Plan your organization’s tone and voice. How do you want to come across to your audience? What’s the most appropriate way to approach your content? Your content must align with your organization’s mission and goals.

Determine which avenues make the most sense to connect with your audience. Social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Extending your organization across all platforms is unnecessary. Choose the most relevant ones for your audience that are within your budget. Tapp Network can help you create a content strategy to amplify your presence while considering your budget constraints.

3. Content Planning and Creation

With a strong content strategy, you can move on to planning your content calendar and creating the content for the month ahead. Building a monthly content calendar allows you to maintain consistency. In doing this, your audience will grow to rely on your content and look to your organization as an authoritative, current, and reputable source.

Brainstorm ideas for content that will resonate with your audience. Get creative and incorporate a mixture of insight into your organization, meaningful storytelling, solutions that your service can provide, and content that sparks community engagement. If you’re struggling to find the time and resources for content planning and creation, look no further than Tapp Network! Our team has the tools and proficiency to create meaningful content and graphics that align with your mission and vision.

4. Publishing Best Practices

Before scheduling your content to publish, it’s important to remember best practices for each platform. Take the time to research key factors about how various features work and what type of content performs best on specific platforms. Some details to consider are character count in captions, relevant tags and hashtags, location tags, images versus video, graphics versus photography, video length, posting frequency, and the best times to post. It’s also beneficial to consider cross-platform strategies for maximum reach.

Ensuring your content is shared at an optimal time for your audience has become much more straightforward. Streamlined auto-publishers, like Agorapulse for social media, allow you to share content at a time tailored to your audience’s most active engagement. Discover Tapp Network’s digital marketing offerings for effortless publishing with best practices prioritized.

5. Leveraging Paid Advertising

Yes, paid advertising is within reach for nonprofits! Establishing a detailed marketing budget at the top of the fiscal year will set you up for success so you can prepare some of your budget for ads. Tapp Network’s value-driven services can help you find impactful ways to advertise your organization within those confines.

There are many types of ads to consider. As stated on Hubspot, Google ads are a great way to drive traffic to your organization as consumers search for similar products and services. Social media ads can be created on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. These ads help promote your brand, boost customer engagement, and can be shared in various ways within each platform. 

Paid ads should always have specific goals, from building brand awareness to gaining leads and conversions. Setting measurable goals will allow you to look back at metrics afterward. You’ll be able to see what performed well and what could use improvement in the future.

6. Analytics and Measuring Success

The best way to evaluate your return on investment (ROI) is to track analytics each month or quarter. Analytics reporting breaks down who is engaging with your content, how much they engage, and whether your content resonates with them. Identify the metrics that best correlate with your goals. Analytics tools like Google Analytics for YouTube or built-in reporting through social media apps and Agorapulse make it easy to track performance. Whether you see positive or negative results, you can still make conclusions and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Master social media with Tapp Network’s Social Media Best Practices Guide! It’s the ultimate playbook tailored to YOUR organization so you can effortlessly connect with your community. 

Our guide offers: 

- Effective Strategy & Planning

- Dynamic Content Creation

- Efficient Publishing & Monitoring

- Tips On Hashtags, Optimization, And More!

Get Started

Interested to learn more about the right marketing strategy for your nonprofit and hear about nonprofits we’ve helped? Watch our recent webinar, “Introduction to TechSoup’s Digital Marketing Services and Use Cases,” with the co-founder of Tapp Network, Joe DiGiovanni, and our Director of Account Strategy, Lisa Quigley, by clicking here. 

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