Four Resources to Help Get You Get a Handle on Social Media

For smaller non-profits with limited operating capital and a small staff, social media can present both tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. How much of your staff’s valuable time to you devote to managing all your accounts, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and all the rest? What’s the return on investment for that time? Should you be putting more emphasis on some social media channels over others?

agorapulse

John Haydon, that guru of all things non-profit and marketing, shared an article by Lisa Kalner Williams in which she suggests four stellar tools—all very affordable—that can help you get control of all your social media outlets, optimizing them for prime effectiveness and engagement without spending an inordinate amount of time juggling posts, searching for important and relevant articles and struggling to keep your supporters in the conversation.

Post Planner
Not sure what to post in order to raise engagement on your social media pages? Post Planner helps you to seek out articles by listing relevant results based on their success on Facebook. You install the independent app on your page it automatically identifies and adds trending content and publishes your blog feed based on details such as gender, age, level of education and so on. You can also upload bulk files of posts at once and make your content available to other Post Planners and Facebook experts. It’s free to start, and reasonably priced should you wish to continue.

Buffer
For those short on time but heavy on content, Buffer allows you to build a queue of posts that will feed into your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest accounts based on the schedule you set up. A nice feature is that you can access the app from a dedicated page or through an extension of your favorite web browser or news reader. The site practically guarantees it can save you hours every day, and their “awesome plan” is comprehensive enough to suit every social media need and want. And a nice bonus is this: they offer non-profits a 50 percent discount off all their plans.

Agorapulse
Managing ongoing conversations can really take up time, and Agorapulse smoothes out the process. Utilizing a social inbox, the app highlights unread and unanswered queries, much like Gmail. Williams notes that the style of Agorapulse is more intuitive than other tools that use a dashboard template, and the “user feature” tracks your followers based on their interaction with your social media channels or how often they pass along posts or mentions of your non-profit. This can help you identify which followers you should be targeting with information, invitations and announcements as well as those who are most likely to donate to your organization.

Viraltag
If you want to make your social media channels more visual, consider using Viraltag. By syncing with the Canva tool, you can create an image and directly post it to Facebook, Tumblr and other outlets. Integrate it with your office Dropbox account and you and your colleagues can have instant access to images and visual creations immediately, saving valuable time that’s often wasted wading through folder after folder of pictures looking for just the right one. And its non-profit rate is only $12 per month for one account on each social media platform.

 


Creating Digital Destinations that Build Communities and Change Lives.

Our non-profit clients consistently tell us their biggest challenges are improving donor engagement and promoting their mission online. At Byte Technology, we understand that creating a successful online presence for non-profits isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” undertaking. By choosing the right tools for your organization, Byte Technology can help you create online strategies that foster engagement with your volunteers, patrons and donors specifically—allowing you the capability to build stronger relations with the people that matter to your organization most.

Learn more about Byte Technology’s strategic web consulting for nonprofits.

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