Engage Your Audience through Social Media

Social media is an effective, yet inexpensive way, to grow your company’s value. However, just creating social media profiles will not leverage your organization in the best way possible. Social media needs strategic planning and engagement with your audience. In this blog, I will cover simple, yet effective ways to engage and connect with your audience while you grow your social media presence.

Why Use Social Media?

Social media give you an opportunity to promote your organization and find people who connect with your mission. There is no shortage of people on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Social media requires little budget. It has revolutionized how we connect and communicate with customers, volunteers, and those interested in our mission.

According to HubSpot, the main priorities of social media marketers at nonprofits are to fundraise, generate brand awareness, recruit volunteers, or to share news.

How to Use Social Media

First of all, you need to know your audience!

You need a basic understanding of who you are talking to when you post on social media to make a connection. Building strong relationships will keep customers coming. Everyone craves personalization. If content doesn’t speak to the user, they will keep scrolling.

Get to know your audience by asking some simple questions: Who do you want to shop / volunteer / engage with your business? Look at your current demographics and figure out what they have in common — do they fall in a certain age range, have similar jobs?

See who currently interacts with your company through social media and other channels. Pull the basic analytics provided by social channels to see demographics of those interacting online with your business. You can also ASK! Send surveys to those on your email list or to those following you on social media.

Create Personas

Once you get an idea of who your audience is, create personas to help you learn more and create content for them. Give them a name — it makes them more real — create content for them and solve their problems. Answer the question why they want to work with you. Picture these personas every time you make content.

Gathering information about your audience will help you connect with them with strategically planned content. Knowing your audience will help you narrow down your efforts on social media.

Next, find your audience!

Focus on the social media channels that matter. Especially if you have limited time and resources. Once you have an understanding of who your audience is, you’ll be able to figure out what social media channels they hang out on.

Each social media channel draws different audiences.

Create a Social Media Plan

There is no magic plan/strategy to implement and see instant success, social media requires you to try, measure, change. Measure to maximize your results.

How do you measure your results? You need to establish metrics you want to see, such as engagement, awareness, and return on investment (ROI). Engagement are measurements such as number of comments, shares, and retweets. These things add up! To get your engagement rate, divide the number of engagements by impressions or reach.

What are impressions? This is how many times your post shows up in a Feed. Reach is the number of potential unique views a post could have — usually this is your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower count.

And always, the end goal! Referrals and conversions. You want people engaging, but you also need them to land on your website and convert. A referral is how a user lands on your website, while a conversion is when someone purchases or acts.

Setting Your Goals

What do you want to get out of social media? For an example, lets say you want to increase volunteer turnout for an event. To do so, you’ll want to make sure potential volunteers are seeing and engaging with your social posts.

• Increase engagement — make it easy for someone to volunteer with links and a call to action.
• Analyze your reach and impressions — make sure you are reaching more people and reaching the right people.
• Measure your ROI — are more people signing up to volunteer?

Implement Your Plan + Engage with Your Audience

Once you have a plan, follow it! It is helpful and huge time saver to schedule content. You can set reminders to review and analyze your results.  

Once you know your audience, it is time to engage with them! You can’t just create content and ignore it. To engage your audience through social media, make sure you know your voice and speak directly to your audience. This means using branding messaging and keeping it real!

Make sure you are posting interactive, positive, and engaging content You want to encourage reactions, shares, comments, and conversation. To do this, make your supporters feel valued, share this stories. Provide links and Call to Actions and use eye-catching graphics and videos.

Once someone is engaging, keep the conversation going! Check your social media often and respond to questions and comments.  A great way to build your community is to share content from other similar pages — with permission of course! This also helps you save time on content creation!

Be consistent with your posting times, social handles and URLs, and branding! Use hashtags to expand your reach, but be sure to use hashtag tracking tools (Inflact, Tailwind, Kicksta, etc).

Use Resources to your Advantage

Free resources:

As I mentioned, social media can be a budget-friendly way to get in front of your audience. You can also use free tools to your advantage!

Along with sharing content, you can collaborate with other organizations. This gets you in front of their audience and gets them in front of your audience. You can also subscribe to newsletters and blogs such as SpoutSocial and Social Media Examiner for tips and trends.

If you want to get ahead and schedule content, a helpful tool for Facebook and Instagram are Facebook Business Manager and Facebook Creator Studio. If you are wanting to create graphics quickly and easily, use tools like Canva. (Not free, but Canva also has a tool to schedule content if you want to stay on one website).

Outsource to experts:

If you want to take your social media to the next level, you can outsource to experts, such as a Social Media Manager or graphic designer. Social Media Managers can create, engage, and analyze social media efforts for you, while a graphic designer can help create eye-catching graphics.

I hope you found this information helpful for your social media endeavors! If you are stuck with content creation, I have provided a downloadable PDF with a list of social prompts. Just customize it with your voice and brand! Click here to download.