How Non-Profit Organizations Can Master Facebook & Twitter. With the topsy turvy economy of the past few years, many non-profit organizations have been struggling to achieve their fundraising goals so they need all the help that they can get. Although it is accepted that every non-profit has to have an extensive social media presence, not all make the best of their social opportunities. Following these Facebook and Twitter tips can help any non-profit maximize their online efficiencies and assist with their fundraising activities.

Facebook

• Don’t miss a single opportunity to place a Like button. Not only does the Like button belong in every single instance where your organization has an online presence but it should also extend to offline advertising and promotions.
• Ensure that your blog is fully integrated into your Facebook presence so that one organically flows from the other.
• Hold ongoing surveys and polls to obtain in-depth insight into what your fans think of your organization and mission as well as to glean invaluable information on their demographic profiles, geography, behavior, and just about every aspect of their personalities which you can cater to in your fundraising campaign.
• Make extensive use of Facebook Insights to measure how successfully you are conducting your campaign. Through the information you will absorb through this tool you will be able to determine which posts obtained the highest number of link clicks, Likes, and shares so you can emulate the features they contained in your future posts.
• Motivate your fans to upload videos and images to your Facebook page in every way you can. You are only limited by your imagination as you can create contests, sweepstakes, games, and all sorts of incentives to get user generated visual content placed on your Facebook page which supports your mission.
• Provide an app. Half of all Facebook activity is conducted on a mobile device so the more effective and easy to use your app is, the more your fans will become engaged and promote your values, mission and fundraising goals.
• Tag everything that you can as it will broaden your organization’s exposure. You can tag a conference or symposium your organization is sponsoring, other organizations’ content that you’re curating, favorite causes or activities, and just about everything else.
• Thoroughly integrate your CRM with your Facebook fan activity so that you can identify evangelists and advocates to further incentivize and motivate in order to benefit from their positive shares among their widespread communities.
• You can’t hold a single event, function, or occasion without it being reflected on your Facebook page, so make sure that you are listing absolutely everything that is happening with your organization in your posts, and do it as far in advance of the particular date as possible.

Twitter

• Craft a customized, specially designed background for your organization’s Twitter account which relates to your brand and mission.
• Develop unique, memorable hashtags keyed in to each primary aspect of your entire fundraising and identity campaign.
• Engage your followers by retweeting their most relevant tweets and actively participating in selected discussions they are involved in which are relevant to your organization.
• Facilitate retweets by providing buttons and links on all of your social media and website presences so that your followers have plenty of opportunities to pass on particularly relevant tweets.
• Make extensive use of URL shorteners to ensure that you’re not taking up too many of those precious 140 characters.
• Provide individual handles to various key personnel so that they can be identified personally when they contribute to your Twitter content.
• Rework your entire profile and description of your Twitter account to ensure that it tells a comprehensive, compelling, and coherent story about your non-profit.
• Set up a system whereby every single Tweet is going to be sent to a moderator for review prior to posting. This will eliminate impulsive tweets which can reflect badly on the entire organization.
• You can’t analyze enough, so ensure that all of the most important Twitter statistics are thoroughly tracked and scrutinized to keep your organization up to date as to the performance of the entire social media campaign.

Applying these tips may help you ride the groundswell of social support! Go get ‘em!