This is the first of what I intend to be a 4-part series of posts about how nonprofits can better use social media. But before I can really talk about “best practices”, it’s probably best to just start with “why?”, as in “Why should my nonprofit organization even be using social media at all?”
I meet daily with nonprofit organizations and I’m often struck by what an interesting point in time this is, in early 2010. Some nonprofits already have a very active presence in social media, some want to but just don’t know where to start, and others don’t believe in social media at all. Which means that social media today is pretty much about exactly where the web was in 1995 – some early adopters, some strugglers, and some ardent non-believers.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube are the big names in social media, but “what is social media?” One definition is simply that in social media there’s a 2-way conversation going on, as opposed to traditional media (TV, radio, websites), where the conversation is really 1-way. And there’s also a “social” component, usually having to do with the fact that individual people are connecting and sharing with each other (over 50 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week).
Humans are naturally social creatures; when we get together and socialize we naturally talk about and advocate for the things we care about. Combine this natural behavior with the network effect (if I tell 10 people about a cause I’m passionate about, and each of them tells ten people, and each of them tell ten people, we suddenly have 1,000 new recruits to our cause) and social media is an environment which is incredibly fertile for nonprofits to use for fundraising, awareness, and advocacy.
Like any communications tool, social media requires a plan – objectives, content strategy, audience, tactics, and integration into your overall communications strategy. And like other communications tools, social media also requires ongoing care and feeding in order to be effective.
Over my next three posts I’ll write about what that social media plan looks like for some of the leading nonprofits which are effectively using social media today.
Next up: Who should own the social media strategy within a nonprofit organization?
