Having an active social media presence is vital these days According to the Giving Report, 29% of people consider social media to be the communication tool that most inspires giving. It can be difficult to know where to start though… which platforms should you use? When should you post? What should you post? These are all questions we will answer in this blog.
Understand your audience
Our first tip for optimising your use of social media is to ensure that you fully understand your audience. Who are they? What are they interested in? And what is their social media usage like?
The best way to gain an understanding of your audience is to look at your current social media insights from this, you can get a lot of information about some of the key demographics you are reaching including age, gender and what time of the day they are usually active online.
You can also look at your previous posts to see which ones were the most successful – this will give you an idea of what kind of content your audience likes to engage with most. Once you have an understanding of who your audience is and what they want to see you can move on to step two…
Solidify your brand voice
Coming up with a clear and consistent brand voice is extremely important for any brand, especially a charity, it will help you to ensure that no matter who is posting on your social media you will always have the same tone of voice.
An example of a charity that does this really well is Bloody Good Period, their messaging and branding are consistent through their social media, website and advertising. They have a quirky, comedic tone of voice that increases audience engagement by relating to their audience and encouraging them to get involved.
Create engaging content
From all of the research and preparation you have done, you are ready to start creating your content. Start simple with a few graphics describing your mission using your brand colours, you can easily make these in Canva.
Other ideas for easy-to-make social media content:
- Your success stories – video and image content
- A day in the life at your organisation – video content
- Promotion of your upcoming events – video and image content
- The progress your charity has helped generate
Make use of trending reel sounds
Trending sounds are the best way to increase the reach of your posts, posting content with a trending sound will help to get you on more people’s reel feeds.
On Instagram you will see the reels page – this is a feed that is separate from the normal feed, made specifically for reels.
To identify trending sounds you need to look for the arrow icon next to the sound. You can click on the arrow icon and view all of the recent trending sounds, by clicking on each of the sounds you can see what kind of content has been created with this sound previously. By recreating successful videos with your own twist you can easily generate new content and get your content in front of more people.
Stay Consistent
Being consistent with your posting is one of the most important factors to succeeding on every social media platform. Here is a breakdown of how frequently you should be posting on each platform to get the best results:
Instagram: 3-5 grid posts per week and 2 stories per day
TikTok: Optimal posting on TikTok is 1-4 times per day but make sure to have a minimum of 4-5 posts per week
Facebook: 1-2 times per day is optimal for Facebook with a minimum of 5 times per week
LinkedIn: Once a day with a minimum of one post per week from your business account.
Engage with your audience
Don’t “post and ghost”. Make sure to stick around on your social platforms after you have posted your content in order to engage with your audience and respond to any comments they leave. This helps to boost you engagement and will increase the reach of your social media posts.
Overall social media is not too difficult to master but it takes a lot of dedication and time management to ensure that you always have a steady flow of content being created. Try and get your whole team involved so you never run out of ideas – get your brainstorm on together.
