When done correctly, Social media can be a very powerful tool to raise awareness for nonprofits! With millions of people actively using social media every day, how can nonprofits maximize their potential when posting content online? Do you have to treat all social media channels the same? And what should this content look like? Here are our tips for maximizing nonprofit brand awareness.

Here are some of the best tips and tricks I have found to be the most helpful:

How Often to Post:

The simple answer is: very frequently! The complicated answer is: it depends on which social media platform you will be using, be it Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Each platform has its own set of recommendations for how often you should post. According to Hubspot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report, businesses are posting 3-4 times a week. But when looking at each social media platform this is what I have gathered:

Facebook:

It all comes down to the number of followers you have, according to Hubspot. If your Facebook following is 0-200 or more than 10,000, the more you post, you will see a steady increase in the number of clicks you’re getting per post. However, this peaks at around 60 posts per month. If you have between 200-10,000 followers, experts recommend posting just once a week, anything more than that, the statistics show your click rate drops by 60%.

Twitter

While Facebook’s set of posting guidelines maybe a little more complicated, Twitter and Instagram is where it gets much easier. With Twitter, whether you’re looking to increase engagement or following, the more posts – the better. On average, you’re looking at about 1-5 short and engaging posts.

Instagram

The most important thing with Instagram is not numbers, but consistency. Whether you decide you’re going to be posting once a day or 3 times a day, the rule of thumb is to continue with that pattern moving forward. If you decide to change the amount you’re posting, that will affect your following. Consistency is KEY!

Best Days and Times to post:

There are many great tools to help you decided when to post. You can use specialized site tools like Instagram’s “insight tools” that let you look at what time your audience is online or you can take a look at these great heatmaps on Social Sprout that show what time people are active depending on the industry. As a nonprofit, here are the following times to post during the week:

How to create varied content

Now that you know when and how much to post, you have to answer what you’ll be posting! When creating engaging social media content, the most effective strategy is to create a variety of content- here are some examples:

1. Use striking imagery – Take pictures yourself or use stock imagery, to grab the attention of people scrolling through their timelines. On Twitter, use image posts if you want to convey more information than the character limit allows. On Instagram, posts that have carousel images (about 2-3) actually get more engagement than single posts.
2. Infographics – Convey interesting facts, statistics, and information through infographics that are easy to understand. Canva has free templates that can help with designs.
3. Create videos / Livestreams – Fun Fact: on Instagram when you post to IGTV your videos will actually appear larger on the explore page, allowing audiences’ eyes to gravitate towards videos over image posts.
4. Use interactive tools – On Twitter, you can create polls to interact with your audience. On Instagram, you can create polls, ask questions, create quizzes, and much more. These tools are especially effective if you want to get audience feedback.

How to Tailor Content and Messaging to individual platforms

As we’ve learned throughout this post, every platform has its own unique set of guidelines and tools – so your content should reflect that. In order to decide what content will go on which platform, I suggest doing a social media audit on each platform.

When looking through your social media think about-

1. Who are my followers? Are they other nonprofits, are they businesses, are they personal profiles? If they are personal profiles, who are they? Hootsuite has a great blog post on what to look for when identifying your target audience.
2. What is working? Look at your previous posts and see what content had the most engagement with your audience. Was it when you posted a personal story? A motivational post? An interactive post?
3. Knowing your tools! Tailor your posts to what we know about post frequency and the types of tools each platform offers. For example – using Twitter’s poll tool to get quick feedback from your audience but using Facebook to create lengthy and informative posts about your nonprofit.

Taking into consideration how often, what times, and what kind of content to post across media platforms, your brand awareness will start reaching greater audiences. Additionally, When you register your nonprofit with RoundUp App, we make it easy for you to start creating with access to our entire marketing library.