 Hi everybody. Welcome to today's session. We're going to go ahead and get started in just a couple of minutes. But before we do that, if you're online and if you have a moment, just drop a quick note in chat to let us know where you're calling in from today. It's so great to see where folks are calling in from. There's quite a span. Massachusetts, Kansas City, Missouri, Chicago, Wisconsin, Oregon, Detroit, Charlotte, another Chicago. Oh, and great Vancouver, Tennessee, Albuquerque, Romania, and another British Columbia. So welcome. Again, we're going to get started in just a minute or two. And hello to California. I think that's about it. All right, so we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you everybody. And welcome to today's session on digital marketing for nonprofits with Hootsuite. We are delighted to have Roya Calvasi join us today from Hootsuite. But before we get started with the specifics of the presentation, we have a couple of quick housekeeping items to take care of. If you have questions during the session, please drop them in the Q&A section of Zoom at the bottom. We've all been doing Zoom, I think, for a while now. But if you can't, it's the Q&A button at the bottom. We will have time for questions at the end of the session and we encourage you to ask those questions, keep coming in. Happy to have a conversation at the end of the formal presentation. Also, don't forget to check your email after the event. We will be sending links and recording and any additional resources that come up today in a follow-up email in a day or so after the session. Also, if you learned something incredibly cool today or something you want to share, please do not hesitate to give us a shout out on social media. If you can, please use the hashtag TS webinar. Lastly, just a quick reminder that closed captioning is available today. Definitely feel free to switch that on if you find that useful. Thank you. Those are the housekeeping tips for today. And also before we get into the details of today's session, we wanted to welcome you to TechSoup's global network, especially for those of you who are new here. We really believe very strongly in the power of technology to do good and to help nonprofits and other social benefit organizations move forward with their important community impact missions. And we're hoping that this conversation today will help demonstrate a part of how that's made possible. So moving on to the details of today's session, our guest speaker today is Roya Calvasi. And thank you so much Roya for being with us today. It's great to have you. Roya is a passionate customer success manager dedicated to driving organizational success through strategic social media planning. She has a wealth of experience as a trusted advisor with a commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction and fostering business growth. Roya helps organizations plan, implement and execute their social media strategies and helps ensure that those strategies align seamlessly with overall goals and objectives. Roya's approach is granted a deep understanding of diverse social media platforms and a keen awareness of emerging trends and additional landscape. And without further ado, let me go ahead and pass the presentation over to Roya. Take it away. Thanks Roya. Thanks Katrin. Hello everyone and welcome to the Texas webinar. Thanks so much for participating today. And I hope we all have great time together and can learn something new that's going to help us with our social media strategy going forward. So as Katrin mentioned, my name is Roya Calvasi and I'm a senior customer success manager. I have been with Hootsuite for almost four years now and my main focus has been helping our customers become successful and achieve their goals when it comes to social media marketing. Today also with me I have my amazing colleague Laura Richley. She will be also helping me throughout the session. So feel free to use the Q&A function in the Zoom and drop your questions throughout the session. And also we'll leave some time at the end to go over your questions if there's anybody who wants to come off mute and ask your questions so that others can also benefit from it. We will leave some time towards the end of today's session. Alright so let's get started with going through our agenda today. So we're going to start with going over how to conduct a high level audit for your social media pages. So we're going to start with that just because this is a key step towards making sure that what you're working today is working towards your goals and helping you become successful. So once we are done with our audit the next step would be to plan ahead. So making sure that based on what we have learned from the audit, our past experience, we are planning for the future. So there are some best practices and tips and tricks that we're going to share around that. Then we'll be going over social media, social media listening strategy. So whether you're doing it right now or whether this is something you're considering, we'll go over some basics and some best practices when it comes to social media listening. And then as a wrap up for the session, we'll go over some best practices and tips and tricks when it comes to all the practices you're doing towards your social media goals. These are very high level, we're going to touch on a few things in terms of best practices. And so again, we'll go over that as the final section before we wrap up and leave some time for the Q&A at the end. So as for the next, for the first step, let's go over conducting and audit. So on the next slide, we're going to first start with understanding why we should be doing a social media audit and how often we should be doing it. Based on the experience working with non-profit organizations, we have learned that one of the biggest challenges for these organizations is understanding if what you're doing is working for them and what's working best so they can figure out how to use their limited resources to be more effective. So feel free to drop in the chat if this is a challenge for your team and for your organization as well. But in order to understand what's working and what's not and what you need to change in terms of your social media strategy, the first step is to do an audit. This could be a quarterly audit. This could be an audit after you have run a big campaign, or it could be just a yearly activity that you do to look at your past year, see what's worked best, and what do you need to change and what are the gaps. So as we know, there are a lot of metrics that you can track towards understanding your activities and their impact on social. So it could be overwhelming. So it's really important that you focus on what's important for your organization. So first of all, we want to focus on our social media channel. So the platforms that are using the platforms that we have presence on our profiles. We want to distinguish and we want to identify what's the best platform that's giving us the best result that we're looking for. So it's really important to track and audit your platforms every often to make sure that you are reaching the right audience and understand where your audience are to better strategically reach out to them. You want to understand what your audience wants to see. So what are the top performing activities in terms of engagement? So what are the things that your audience are typically engaging with more often, which means that those are the things they're looking for. So you want to, and the next is you want to understand who your audiences are so you can tailor your strategy accordingly to make sure that what you are doing is effective and impactful. Doing an audit also help you understand how each platform is contributing to your goals. So one platform can be helping you getting more visibility, creating more grand awareness. Other platform could be helping you generating more leads. So you want to understand all of that so you can again tailor your content strategy and your social media strategy accordingly. And then finally, knowing all this information is going to help you generate new ideas, identify the gaps, see what you're doing that's working according to your goals, make sure that you continue doing that. So these are the main reasons why you want to do an audit on a regular basis. Again, this could be quarterly, this could be yearly. According to the amount of activities you have and the resources that you have, you want to make sure that you just do it on a regular basis and always compare it to the previous audit result that you have done in the past. On the next slide, I have included the steps on how to do an audit. I will go into the detail of each, but first you want to list all your social media accounts on a specific platform. You might have multiple accounts. You want to make sure you consider all of that. You want to evaluate and audit each profile that you have on social. You want to identify your top performing content and posts according to your goals. What is what is more important for your team? And then evaluate each social media to make sure that, again, you are considering which platform is more helpful, which is helping you achieve your goals and then understanding your audience on each of those platforms. So first and foremost, for the first one on the next slide, you want to have a template. It is could be as simple as what you see on the screen. This could be a more, like there could be more columns and more information you want to capture. This one is a simple one that I have here. You can also use one of our blogs on our website that has a beautiful template as well as some guidance on how to best audit your social media platforms. But you want to start with, as I mentioned, listing your social accounts. So having a URL for each of those accounts helps you directly go to that page and get additional information you want to put on your audit table. And then you want to count, you want to have a count of the followers on each of those profiles. You want to know which profile has more visibility, has more followers on it, and how you're doing compared to the past. Are you getting more followers? Which platform, again, is getting more visibility compared to the last time that you did the audit? Then you want to have your average monthly activity. This is typically the number of posts you have shared on each of those profiles, average for each month. So then you can take a look right away and compare your monthly activity against your number of followers. Are you more active on the profiles that has more followers? Or is more activity leading to gaining more followers? So already with this information, you can get some ideas around how you are performing on each of those social profiles. The next thing that we typically recommend is focusing on your top performing posts. So for each of those profiles, identify the top three posts based on the metrics that is more important for you. This could be engagement. It could be the number of comments each post has received or number of likes each of those posts have received. So based on, again, whatever is important for you on each of those profiles, identify the top three posts. Again, this can go further into more detail, but even with this basic information, you can take a look at your performance on each of those profiles. Number of followers, average number of like posts you have shared for each month and then which posts are high performing for your accounts. And then as the next step on the next slide, the other thing that is very key and maybe even should have been done as the first step is evaluating your profile. So you definitely have profiles on different platforms, even on some you might have multiple profiles. It's really important to audit your profiles on a regular basis. You want to make sure that your profile is up to date, whether it's the cover image, it's the links you include on your profile. You want to make sure that everything is on brand and up to date. And maybe from time to time, you want to change your cover photo, your profile picture to make sure that it is aligned with your focus. Maybe based on the next upcoming campaign, you want to have a new cover photo that on its own it can engage people or get more visibility among your followers. Whatever you're including in your bio, you want to make sure that again, it resonates with your brand tone of voice. You want to make sure that it is up to date, consistent across all the profiles that you have. You want to make sure that your profile name is also consistent. If you have multiple locations, you want a profile for each of those locations, you want to make sure that it is included in the name of your social page. Just so that it's easier for your audience to find the page. And any link on your profile, whether it's linking to your website, to upcoming campaigns, fundraising events, you want to make sure that those links are also up to date. So these are the important things you want to review on your profile, as well as your pinned post. So on each profile, you know that you can pin some of the important posts you want to give more visibility to. You want to make sure that from time to time you change those posts to make sure that these are aligned with what you are currently focusing on. And also make it more appealing for followers if they are coming back to your pages. So again, a key step is to evaluate your profiles on a regular basis as well. And then as the next step during your audit process on the next slide, you want to look for patterns. So now that you have done your profile audit, you have taken a look at your performance on each of those social profiles. You want to take a look at the performance data and see if there's any particular topic, post type, whether it's image post or video post, that are better in terms of engagement performance. What are the best posts in terms of engagement? What are resonating more with your audience? You want to identify those patterns and include them as you are planning for the upcoming months for your social media strategy. Taking a look at the performance across your social networks, again, making sure that you are reaching your audience on the right platform. And finally, if you are doing any sort of like engaging posts like questions, polls, you want to make sure that you're getting the right engagement and result according to your needs. If not, let's take a look at what's not working. If it is a question, make sure that it is targeting the right people on the social network. So for example, if you're posting a question on LinkedIn, because typically it's a professional audience on LinkedIn, you want to make sure that your question and your poll is resonating with the audience on that social platform. So again, key steps in auditing. You want to audit your profiles, make sure they are up to date and easily find being able to find it on social channels. You want to audit your performance on each of those social channels and look for any trends that can help you for the next step, which is planning your social media goals for the next year. So once audit is completed, you want to start, you want to start planning. So based on the audit results, you might want to revise something, something that is not working for you. You want to change it. Anything that's working, you want to continue doing or improve on. So for the planning ahead, if you go to the next slide, you want to list again your social media platforms and ultimately you want to think about each channel that your organization has presence on and is active on. So then plan accordingly. So maybe your focus for Facebook could be to promote an event because people typically, your audience typically comes to Facebook to know what's coming next. Whereas for LinkedIn, it could be to recruit more volunteers. Instagram could be used for brand awareness and Twitter could be used for customer relationship and support matters. So again, listing your social networks and identifying goals for each of those social channel is the key step and the first step in order to identify your goals. And then on the next line, when you are working on defining your goals for the future, you want to make sure that you are considering your goals to be smart. So you want them to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. And we'll see on the next slide how you can achieve this or how you can leverage this framework to make sure that your goals, even though they could be very general but at the same time you can analyze them and make sure that you achieve them in a time of frame that you identify. So let's start with an example. So which like this goal is typically a common one. So that's why we're going to start with that growing your followers on social media. So this is very, this is very general and high level how we can make it being smart based on the smart framework. You want to make it more specific. So you want to make sure that you are targeting the right platform and you are working on growing your followers on the right platform. So we're going to say we don't want to increase our followers on Facebook. And then you want it to be measurable. So for how much. So let's say I want to, I want to say that I'm going to grow my followers on Facebook, and by 1500, you want to make it time bound. How long are we going to work on this goal and achieve it? So growing our Facebook followers by 2% and by the end of the year. So now right now this is very easy to define, easy to measure, and also it's time bound. The metric that you want to track for this goal is your number of followers. So you know where you stand today, and by the end of the year, you're going to track the same metric and then compare it. The other good example could be driving fundraising. So again, this is very high level. We want to make it more specific. So let's say I want to increase our effort for fundraising on Facebook by 2%. So for this one, I can measure the amount of posts that I create for this specific fundraising, the number of clicks that came from those posts. And finally at the end, the amount of fundraising that we were successful to achieve by the activity on Facebook. The last one is the overall brand awareness. So we want to increase it. So let's say again, targeting Facebook, 1% increase in our engagement on Facebook could be the goal that we want to set. And the metrics that we can track for that is the engagement rate. So the amount of interactions that our posts received, likes, comments, and research, or you could even take it to the next level by considering the number of clicks on the post or video views to determine the amount of awareness that our activity on Facebook created. So again, these are high levels, but you can always use the same format to identify your overall goals and then make them more specific and list the metrics you want to track for each of those goals. Alright, so now that we have done the audit, we have planned and set our goals, let's target another strategy that we can consider, which is social listening strategy. If you are not familiar with what social listening is on the next slide I have a very simple and high level definition of social listening. So this is all about reviewing the mentions of your brand, going out there looking at competitor brands and see what they're doing, any related keywords, you want to search for that on social media and stay on top of anything that's happening out there on social. So this is outside, this could be outside your own brand channel, this could be anywhere on social media on your competitor pages and other platforms, you want to see what's being said about your brand, and also other related keywords in the same industry. So with having that definition in mind on the next slide I have listed some of the use cases for social listening. So here are the five that I have identified, obviously the use case could be more than this, it's not limited to this five, but these are the top use cases, especially for the nonprofit organizations. So first one is understanding your audience, so who your audiences are that you typically interact with. Marketing intelligence, so again, who are the top influencers, what are the stuff saying related and being said on social related to the keywords that are relevant to your organization. Crisis management, so anything that's happening in the industry related to your brand that you want to stay on top of. And customer engagement, so what are your audience again saying about you, what are the posts that they are engaging with more often. And then finally your competitors and any industry trend that you want to be aware of. So we're going to go into the detail of each of these five use cases on the next slide. So the first one being understanding your audience. So you want to know what your audience are saying about your brand, whether they're loving it, whether they are identifying some gaps that you can jump in and help with. You want to be aware of everything that's happening and not everything is said and is basically not all their activities are happening on your own pages so you want to make sure that any mentions of your brand. You're considering those as well and you are going through those so you're not missing out on anything. One of the practices for this one is again understanding your audience finding your popular posts and mentions of your brand so you review them again understanding what your audience is saying about you is going to help you a lot with your future strategies. Checking out your drama graphic so who are the audience that are typically talking about your brand, are you targeting them when you are creating posts on your own brand pages. So these are the stuff that you can learn by having a social listening strategy in place. The next use case was market research. So I'm monitoring the conversations that are happening in the industry, what's working what's not working, what is popular in the market so you might want to consider that as you are planning for your content or even your future events. This information is really helpful to your marketing team to your customer service team. This is really important for them to stay ahead of everything that's being set out in the market. And you might want to tweak your services based on the information that you get from the market research you can do by having a social listening strategy in place. So reviewing the common questions on social that's going to help your team to address those questions on your social profiles on the posts you are creating, and make sure that there are no unanswered questions from your brand perspective, and then identifying popular platforms. Because if you know where your audience is, it's going to be easier for you to reach out to that audience, you know where, if your audience is typically let's say on Facebook, you want to make sure that you align your strategy to have a stronger presence on Facebook. So these are all the intel that you can get from market research. The next use case is crisis management and brand protection. So social listening allows you to track sentiments in real time. So you can know what's being said about your brand and if there's any significant change in how people are talking about your brand, the services they're receiving. You want to make sure that you stay ahead of the game, you are on top of it, you can address anything that's going to have an impact on your brand. And you want to make sure that you are ready to act on it as quickly as possible. So you want to make sure that you are tracking your mentions you are tracking the sentiment of your audience. And if there's any huge shift in there, you can act quickly. So for this one, you can track the mentions as I mentioned and have, you know, then you can set a normal rate for your mentions and then if that norm is changing, you know that there's something going on and you need to act on it. So you can set alerts for that to be notified if the number of mentions, there's a spike there, and then you can act accordingly. Having a crisis management plan in place is obviously helpful. You want to make sure that your team is prepared for any changes that's happening around your brand on social. And then the last one, the one next after that is customer engagement. So on the next slide. And that's another use case for social listening. People are engaging with your posts or mentioning your brand. You want to make sure that you engage with them in the right place. Not just for jumping on it and selling them but also for interacting with them for creating that relationship with your audience. It is really important to make sure that you are engaging with the right audience. And also you are giving them, you are making that relationship with them for not just selling them your services but also again talking about your brand and also answering any questions they might have that you can help with. So creating that relationship is really important. You want to make sure that your team is set to help answer any comments or questions that your audience have. You might want to set a list of preset answers that your team can share with the audience on social just to create that efficiency when it comes to customer engagement. And then finally the last use case, which is around competitor and industry trends. So social listening is more than just understanding what's being said about your brand but also what are what your competitors are doing can help you shift your strategy if needed. So if there's any gap that you can identify by listening to your competitor's audience, you might want to address that and use that to your advantage. So social listening can show you what your competitors are doing in real time. Again, for you not to miss out anything when it comes to setting a strategy. So definitely the practice there would be to checking on your competitors on social media on a regular basis and see what's happening around their brands on social right. So that was the five top use cases for social listening as the next topic. As I mentioned earlier during the agenda, we have identified two practices that we wanted to share with you based on listening to organizations like yours. We identified creating a content calendar and setting up tracking could be beneficial for your team. During today's webinar, I have referred to having a planning place and also tracking your performance on social to understand what's working for your team. So these two practices can help you achieve those. The first one being the content planning. So when we think about building our content on social, we always find it helpful to have a master plan in place. So this could be the list of the relevant events, dates, any upcoming holidays that you want to be prepared for and have a content in place for. So having that master plan help you achieve that efficiency you're looking for when it comes to when it comes to managing your social platforms. So thanks to consider our local events. So you want to be, you want to mention those or have them on your content calendar, any topical activity you want to do on your platforms, whether it's around campaigns, your launching, any resources you want to share with your audience. And then finally, relevant trends and holidays that you want to post about. So having these basics in mind on the next slide, I have a sample calendar. This is very simple and we just like some high level events and holidays. You can definitely take it to next level and adding some more details that you typically post about. Having a calendar like this in place is helpful because you can plan ahead of time. You know what's coming next month and the month following that so you can plan for them. And you can have also, again, campaigns you're running throughout the year so you can adjust the timeline if it is like having conflict with some other events going on. Having a calendar and help you have that bird eye view around like what's happening in the next few months and plan accordingly. And also if there are any trends or if there are anything happening in the industry that you want to act quickly accordingly, having this calendar view can help you with that because you have already got some of the stuff out of your way by planning ahead of time. So you have more resources and time available to focus on those trends and again act accordingly to what's happening in the industry. So again, this is a simplified calendar. Some of you might be using like tools like Hootsuite for that. If you are using Hootsuite, you know that there is a calendar view within the platform that you can have everything in place and schedule posts ahead of time for any upcoming campaign. Events or holiday that's happening in the future. And then the next thing we wanted to review in terms of practices was implementing tracking for your social media posts. Again, in the previous slides I talked about measuring the impact of your posts, whether it is driving traffic to your website to the fundraising events. So all of this is achievable by having a tracking system in place. So when you are creating a post to publish on social and you are trying to drive traffic either to your website to register for an event to participate in the fundraising webinars, all sorts of like registration pages that you have on your website and how to track that and how to make sure that the traffic is coming from social or even narrow it down to which social profile specifically. You need to have a tracking system in place. I have a suggestion on the next slide. If you are using Google Analytics as your as your website system, you can set up UTM parameters. So you can see on the bottom left corner that you have your website.com. This is the URL for your web page. If you start using UTM parameters to track the traffic that has been driven to your website, you can narrow it down to see from which social platform it is coming from what event or even narrow it down to what sort of content drove that traffic. This is really helpful. This is the sample that I got from Google Campaign Builder. This is available to everybody if you use. So basically you have your URL. What else do you want to track? Is it the social platform? Is it the post specifically campaign? So you can add all those identifiers known as UTMs so that when your website receives a click or somebody comes to your website, you would know from which post, from which platform and which campaign activity drove that traffic. These are all the information that can help you identify your top performing posts so that you can leverage as you are planning for upcoming campaign or again as you are putting your content strategy in place. You know what's working better based on your previous activity and you can leverage that knowledge to continue being successful with your social media activity. So if you want to learn more from this, I have included the link to Google Campaign Builder. Feel free to leverage that information on a Hootsie blog. We also have a blog on how to leverage UTMs when you are creating content for social. These two were the two practices I wanted to share for today and then I'm going to wrap it up with just going over some key takeaways from this session. So if you go to the next slide and the slide after that actually. There are three key takeaways. First of all, make sure that you audit your social profiles on a regular basis. The information helps you understand what's working and what's not working and you need to change. Second one, set smart goals. So make sure that your goals are attainable, relevant, time bound, specific and measurable. So start with practicing of jotting down your goals and then using the smart framework to make them more specific. And then make sure you track them on a regular basis. And then finally use data to your advantage. Use all the resources that you have and you can get data from to make sure that you are doing the right thing. And then learn from what's working for your social activities according to your goals. So you continue doing that and anything that's not working. Let's identify why it is not working and then make the necessary changes of there. I hope this was helpful. So I'm going to now hand it over to Catherine. I think the next would be the Q&A section. Thank you so much, Roya. I really appreciated that overview. I was also taking notes as you were talking that to apply to our own program. But now we are going to go ahead and switch over to Q&A. And we do have a few questions popping up online. Let me go ahead and read them out. First from Steve. As a small nonprofit, mostly using Facebook, there is no obvious way to get the information that you described in the audit. Does that mean that Facebook is not good for us? Sorry, I was just on mute. So the information. Yeah, I think I'm not sure what you mean, but get the information I described. Most of the metrics that I had as an example are available on Facebook. And again, there are tools also helping you audit your performance on different social channels, like even at Hootsuite. We do have that information captured for each of those social networks so you can compare and again take a look at your performance. Not sure, Laura, if you want to add anything. Yeah, I think that was great. I totally agree, right? Using tools like Hootsuite or even just looking natively on Facebook, you can get a lot of that great information and data for your audit for sure. Great. Thank you both. And Steve, if you have follow-up questions on any of that, definitely feel free to pop another question in the Q&A. Moving on to the next question from Stephanie. What are your thoughts on threads, particularly in terms of establishing goals, smart framework and the metrics that you would use to track? Yeah, I think everybody is kind of new to threads. Even for us, as we were talking to our customers, we're asking them to have presence on threads, but it's a new platform. So we are also learning from it as well. Unfortunately, there are not much available currently for analytics when it comes to threads. I'm pretty sure that's going to be coming. But for now, what we would recommend to our customers is have a presence there because also that's a new way of reaching out to your audience. But again, in terms of metrics, I think we have to wait a little bit to see where it's going with analytics. Makes sense. Thank you. Next question from Valerie. For setting goals, what number should a small nonprofit expect to achieve? I'll let Laura explain this, but I don't think you can recommend a specific number. I'm pretty sure there are industry benchmarking information available that we can use. Yeah, I would definitely agree. So it's going to look different for everyone, right? Just because everyone's got a different social presence and different audience. And I will say as well, everyone starts from zero, right? So a lot of the times, you know, you're continually trying to grow your audience and grow, you know, your mission and all the great content you're putting out there. So I would say for, you know, maybe a smaller nonprofit, you're working on some of that growth on social, just take a look at what your normal looks like today. And that can be a really good benchmark for driving success in the future. So, like Roy mentioned, there are some good benchmarks for engagement rate or whatnot that we can send over. I think there's a sweet blog. I'll find it and pop it in the chat for you. But really, I would say looking at yourself and comparing yourself to your own performance over time is a really great way to just sort of continue driving success there. But really good question. Fantastic. Thank you. Welcome to another question this time from Mark. How do you get over the hump when getting traction on social media? And when do you need to spend money on promoting posts to get that traction? It's hard to analyze metrics when there is not a lot of activity. I'm going to take a stab at it and then hand it over to Laura. I think that audit practice that I explained earlier could be a good way to start understanding what's not working, why the traction is not as much as you were looking for. You're targeting another platform could be the right thing to do or maybe changing the tone of voice. So all sorts of like things that you can analyze from the data in terms of like who saw your post but didn't interact with it. What's the reach compared to the engagement you got from it. So maybe people are seeing your post but not interacting with it. Like if it is not creating the reach you're looking for in the first place, then that's when you want to promote it because you want to get it out there. You want to go beyond your followers and make it more available to others outside your posts. So that's when promoting and putting some spend behind your post would make sense, as well as like those high performance posts that you always want to promote as well. So great question and I'll ask Laura to also add her input for this question. Yeah, I think I would agree 100% right even if you have some of those. Like if you're looking at your metrics and there's not a lot of activity there. You're still going to get some information right there might be a poster to even if it's not the metrics you want to see. They're performing better than some of the other ones right so use that knowledge to your advantage to say. Everything even though there's maybe not a whole lot of engagement here. These kind of topics are getting a lot of engagement for me. Maybe this post template is. And so what can you sort of take from that and use for your content strategy going forward like Roya mentioned so. Yeah, even if there's not a lot of activity it can give you some good information in like a direction to go. But yeah continually AB test right maybe like Roy mentioned you try out a different platform maybe you try out doing video instead of images. So always be testing as well because you never know what new format or new idea could really help bring some traction for you. It's fun with social right. I know there can be a lot of, you know, formulas and trying to play into the algorithms and all that but really it's a way to connect with your community and connect with, you know folks that also align with your mission so definitely, you know try new things have fun and see what works for you for sure. Excellent thank you. I wanted to circle back to our initial question about Facebook's, we do have a follow up question about that one. As a follow up to my Facebook question, we publish a video each day, as well as text posts for videos, all we get is the body count, no record of who watched, and a view only says that they were there for five seconds, which seems pretty useless. So how do you move forward from there. I would say, first of all, it's not useless data, the fact that people are dropping when watching your video that's a good information, the piece of information to have some you want to make sure that your videos are short. Getting the message and the message out there in the five seconds maybe, and also create more engaging videos or maybe ask your team members to start the engagement on the post and see if it can help with the engagement so people might add more comments as a follow up to your video post. So these are the things that came to my mind right after I heard about like five second dropping gets to useless information, I don't want I want to say that's not useless that's actually helpful so maybe there is something that you are dropping after five seconds. And also you can leverage that information to make sure your videos are created according to how your audience are interacting with your posts. Thank you. A question from Tracy. How does Hootsuite compare with something like Meltwater when it comes to social listening. That's a very detailed question and I can speak to Hootsuite but I have not used Meltwater so it's going to be hard for me to compare the two platforms. I'm not sure what specifically you were looking for in terms of the comparison but obviously within Hootsuite, you can create search queries, basic search queries based on just like certain keywords or you can take it to the next level by adding location other parameters you want to consider and narrow down your search to make sure that you are just seeing what is relevant and what you're looking for. Thank you. A question from Anand. What is the recommended budget, the percentage to be set aside for any nonprofit sector towards their marketing and advertising. That's a good and very specific question. Not sure, Laura, if you have any recommendation for this one. Yeah, yeah, really good question. So I would say it's maybe not as direct of an answer as you might want, but really, you know, everyone's budget is going to look different for paid social. So I think it's more so using the budget that you do have really smartly, right, so like instead of going in and maybe boosting every post with a little bit of paid ad spend. You just go in and you let those posts sit up for a little bit organically and then you just boost some of the top performing ones because you can see that they're resonating with your audience already. Maybe you run a specific paid campaign during, you know, some really, you know, peak events that are happening for you or peak times that you really want to promote, you know, your mission to a broader audience. So when you're running a paid campaign specifically that's not boosted. It's a great opportunity to also a B test and optimize your budget. Right. So maybe you have three different ads within your ad set, and you test one thing so one thing is different about all three of those. Maybe you have the same image for all three posts but you change up the post copy a little bit for each. Maybe you have, you know, different images but the same post copy. Let those run for a little bit usually 24 hours or maybe till it hits a thousand impressions. And then you'll start to see one of those or maybe even to sort of lead the pack. And you might have some underperformers. So then you can turn those ads off and put the rest of your budget towards the ones that are getting some good results for you. So it's kind of a bit of a maybe less direct answer but it's not really like a percentage of your budget socially, let's say but more so how you can optimize and use your budget to make the biggest impact with your social so you know, it always helps to show that impact maybe that budget can always increase down the road for some paid social but start with what you have and really sort of show the impact that it's making by, you know, boosting those top performing posts for you or a B testing within those separate ad campaigns. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Moving on, we are getting near the end of the session so I'm just going to do the next two questions. But if you do have more please don't hesitate to toss them in Q&A or even chat and we can include them in the follow up materials after this session. So a question from Catherine. What is the average number of hours a week do you foresee in our profit would need to dedicate to follow through with your recommended process? I think it all depends on like what you are trying to achieve during the week like if you're running a campaign obviously you need more time being spent on planning and creating content for that whereas some other time could be more quiet but I would say you would at least need like between three hours like a little bit more three to five to for each week to make sure that you are posting your right content engaging with your audience because that's one of the recommendation in terms of keeping your audience engaged by answering their comments answering their questions make sure that you're not missing anything. So I would say three to five but this is not specific to nonprofits so let Laura add in if she has any benchmarking for for this specific industry. Yeah, I would totally agree right a couple couple hours a week to maybe do a little social listening go through some of those campaigns. The audit though once a year right you don't need to do that as regularly. And it's just a good gut check I would say we're coming up on that time right especially with 2024 planning coming in place. So maybe you start sort of working through some of that audit now so that you've got your 2024 plans ready to go. But besides that I would agree, you know, a couple hours a week but the audit might take a little more time. And so for that, you know you want to give yourself a little more bandwidth, but it's only once a year. Thank you both. And just our final question for today session at least live and again definitely don't hesitate to toss questions into the Q&A or chat and we can follow up after. I've heard that platforms downplay posts that link to external sites. So is it better to interact on each platform for the brand like follow share and others rather than posting links, for instance to external news articles. I thought somebody is talking. So for that one I would say I mean you always want to have links in your post on a regular basis because you want to again drive people to some sort of outside the social media activity you're doing whether it's your website it's an event. And so our sorts of things so I don't think they're the way for us to avoid having links in our posts. But obviously you want to focus on your post being engaging as well even on the social media you want it to be some sort of like interactive so they might want to add some comments in there. So you can leverage some of the best practices to keep your post engaging while having the link included in the post so that that would I would say that's the best possible way to avoid getting into the trap of like your post being downplayed because it does include a link. So that was a great question. I'm actually now curious to know more about that so I will do my do that just but I'm pretty sure there are ways to get over that algorithm if the post does include a link it is downplayed but Laura any other strategies you might have. Yeah, I would just agree right put that value right up in the post itself. You know, even if you're linking out to some resources put them in key takeaways in the post right. If someone wants to learn more they're going to click through and learn more regardless. So it's always nice to give them some of those main value takeaways right in the post copy. I kind of heard that as well right I know our even our own who tweet social team has been playing around with linkless posts, and they've seen higher engagement anyways on ones that don't have links in it. So I think it also depends on your goal right if you're wanting to maybe drive more engagements on your posts on social, maybe experiment ab test with a little, you know, a couple posts there with no links to see what that does for you. And that's also important that we drive folks to our website and talk about our mission there so I would say, maybe don't go full fledged into only linkless posts by ab test and see how they do and maybe add them in your strategy from time to time to drive engagement. Thank you that's great. I really appreciate that a response on that one particular very interesting question. So, thank you everybody for joining today. We do need to move to the wrap up. And we do have a couple questions that we didn't quite get to but we will be following up in the follow on after the event today. And thank you also to Roya and Laura for being here today fantastic presentation and again thank you to everybody who entered chat and questions we really appreciate it and some really fantastic questions came up today. And if you can, folks online if you can maybe add something in the chat about something that you learned today. We'd love to hear some of the points that maybe really resonated with you or that you'll be taking with you after today's session. Also, if you enjoy today's session and you want to support similar events like this going forward and maybe reach nonprofits. Feel free to reach out to our team at TechSoup around being engaged or perhaps even sponsoring an event. But I know I just to go back for a quick second on the chat. I just wanted to share a couple things that came up. One, some learned Hailey learned a process for approaching social media as a newbie. Excellent. Love sharing the UTM tip is another thing that came up. And just a lot of thank you for the general knowledge, particularly around reinforcement on marketing in general, and how to solve problems instead of hard selling during a session. Thank you for the feedback. We really appreciate your input via chat. Again, also, if you're interested in perhaps collaborating with TechSoup around an event like this reach out directly to Susan Tambi on our team who can talk to you about possibilities of being a sponsor being more involved with these events. So, again, thank you so much to everybody for attending today. And don't forget to fill out our post event survey. The link is in the chat. And another quick reminder, we will be sending out the slides and any follow up information that is associated with today's presentation. So thank you everybody. And I hope you have a great afternoon. Take care.