Engage and Monitor, Engage and Monitor.

The beauty of social media is that it gives organizations the ability to engage in online conversation with supporters. Social media is very much built for 2-way communication, which is a very powerful thing, but it also means that if you inadvertently treat it as 1-way communication, you’ll run the risk of sounding like one hand clapping. So if your organization is posting to social media, you need to monitor and respond to the discussion around those posts.

You’ve probably had the experience of posting something about an organization and being surprised (and impressed) at how quickly that organization responds to your post. And you’ve probably seen the other extreme, where someone posts a question to an organization’s Facebook page and never gets any response at all. Or, worse yet, someone posts “This organization sucks!” – and that comment just sits there, unmonitored, for all the world to see.

If you’re going to take advantage of the power of social media to initiate conversations with your supporters and better understand their needs, then you need to stick around and actually participate in the discussion.

Laura Chyou, Director of Development and Communications at the Support Network and YWCA, put it to me this way in a recent conversation: “It is crucial to remember that the amazing benefits of social media tools work best when the organization’s leadership is actively involved with managing and monitoring the dialog, as part of the social media strategy”. She points out that since many nonprofit organizations struggle with lack of time, resources, and funding, it’s very easy for this to get overlooked.

But it’s not as hard as many organizations think. Here are some quick tips to making it easy:

• Set a simple Google alert for your organization.
• When you post to your organization’s Facebook page, check back on it at regular intervals (Facebook doesn’t yet have alerts for Pages, unfortunately, but may be adding this feature).
• At least once a day do a Twitter search for mentions of your organization.

Doing an efficient job of paying attention to organization is social media shouldn’t take more then ten minutes a day, and it will be time well spent. In fact, here’s a HubSpot webinar entitled “How To Monitor Your Social Media Presence In 10 Minutes A Day“.

If your organization is going to be active in social media then you need to also be actively participating in the online conversation. Otherwise it’s like not showing up for your own party.

Do have your own experience with this, and how to do it effectively? I’d love to hear about it!