 Welcome to our webinar. I'm Susan Hope Bard. I'm the training and education manager here at TechSoup, and today we are super excited to bring nonprofit communications best practices, tips for using social media, and our presenter today is Molly Bacon. And before I turn this presentation over to her, I do wanna go over a few things with you. And I'm going to share my desktop very quickly. And what you'll see is this is your screen that you should be seeing with someone talking. If you need to adjust the setting, simply click on the gear, and then you can go to the quality, and you can go anywhere from auto, where it adjusts for you, or all the way up to 720. So if the screen ever appears fuzzy, you can go ahead and fix it yourself, or you can play with that to get the best resolution. Another thing I do wanna share with you is that all of the content that you will see today, and that you've seen in the past, you can view that at any time. We record each of these events. You simply go to the date of the event, and I have April and May all in one module, but if you wanted to go and view April 11th, you can simply click on that tab, you can view the video, you can complete the survey, you can look at all of the resources. So for today's event, what's already in there is the survey, which we want you to take at the end, and then all of Molly's links. So a lot of you are gonna worry about some of the content she shares with you. Don't worry because everything is in the course. You simply go back to this module, June 20th, and you can click on her presentation, and you can click on any of the links with all of the resources that she's put together for you. So I just wanna make you aware of that before I turn it over to Molly, I will also be chatting out the links in the chat box. Feel free to also ask any questions you might have. And I'm gonna turn it over to Molly. Hi there, I'm Molly, I'm the social media manager at TechSoup, and I've been managing social media accounts for over five years for nonprofits and businesses, and I'm really excited today to show you some tips. This will be definitely geared towards beginners. So people who are just getting started on social media for your nonprofit or organization, and really if you have already existing profiles, you can really use this to optimize and rethink your strategy. So it's still valuable, but I just want to let you know that this will be geared towards beginners. So let's get started. I'm gonna share my screen now. Can you see it? Let me show you all, can you see it, so yeah. All right, and so here it is. So we're going to start with the agenda. So today I hope that you will be able to walk away and establish your target audience, set your goals for your social media channels, actually choose the social media channels that are best for your organization, establish your brand voice on social media, and learn how to optimize with analytics and what you should be thinking about when it comes to that. So sorry about that. So let's start it. So let's talk about the target audience and channels. So who are you trying to reach is the first question you should ask. Are these donors, members, new customers, advocates, influencers, and then based on who your target audience is, then you're gonna establish what are their demographics, what are their age, what is their gender, are they in urban areas, rural areas, are they in the United States, or are they global? So once you figure out that, then you're going to say, well, how can I reach these people on social media? And so depending on the social media channels, there's a little bit of different demographics. So it's very important to first establish your own demographics and target audience for your organization, and then actively think about what channels are gonna be the best to suit those. Social media demographics. So I love the statistics. So did you know that YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than any cable network in the United States? And I have the link there for you guys so you can see. And 2.8 billion people are on social media, so this is not a small number. We know that this is a very large number of people. So it's best to make sure you're on the right ones. So let's go through each one. And again, the links are provided if you wanna follow up with more details on these. I have the articles that I'm referencing here. So Facebook. This is the largest platform, the most amount of users, and there's technically more women than men, but only a slight amount. And you'll see that ages 18 through really 65 plus are all using this platform. So this is a very wide range of users in terms of age demographics. And we can also see that the location is pretty similar as well. So there's people in urban areas, suburban areas, and rural areas. The education level is pretty vast. It's not just college educated people and the income levels as well. So Facebook is great for a lot of different audiences and it's a great one to get started with. Instagram is more younger generation. It's the 18 to 29 year olds is the largest amount and it's pretty significantly larger than the others. And it's a little bit more women than men. And you'll find that on Instagram, was bought by Facebook. And so it's really growing a lot. And I think that you will start to see these users change. So might not be the best audience if you're trying to reach elder right now, but keep an eye on it because in a few years you never know where these numbers are gonna go. But we will say that urban and suburban and rural are all really using Instagram. So all locations are good there. And income levels are a little bit lower than Facebook of course, because it's a younger population. And Instagram's all photo and video based, so just keep that in mind. Twitter, there's more women than men, but only slightly. So you kind of see this across all platforms in this statistics by Sprout Social. And Twitter is again really, it's mostly younger people, but you do see a large amount compared to Instagram. You see more older generations on Twitter as well. And you also see it across different locations and education types. And then LinkedIn, a professional platform, so keep that in mind. It's a different focus than the others. And you will see again a larger amount of older people from 50 to 65, a lot larger than Twitter. So you really can see here that there's a large range as well as Facebook on the amount of age users. And the locations you see are again, not as being used as popular in rural areas. So that's something to keep in mind. It's more urban and suburban areas. And on the bottom you can even see the employed versus not employed. So that's interesting. And then Pinterest is more women. Again, younger, but it does have some 30 to 64-year-olds, like a decent amount. And this is really used for obviously visual purposes. So a lot of people use it for style and weddings. That's a big one. And kind of DIY crafts and things like that. So it has a little bit of a different focus. And infographics can work really well here as well and linking to your blogs. But keep in mind that the actual focus and the users is gonna be different here. So you're really gonna have to curate your content on here. But people will be generating pins from your content as well. So just keep an eye on that. So then next, let's talk about what types of content you can post. So you haven't chosen a platform yet. You're just still establishing what is capable within your organization. What are you able to post right now with the resources you have at your organization? So let's talk about that. So blogs at TechSoup, we have a pretty big blog. So on the right-hand side in that post, you can see that this was a post that we recently did. And you can see here that this was our blog and you can tell that it's straight from our blog and that's a graphic that we were able to use. But we also have a medium channel and this is a new initiative that we took on. But I wanted to point this out to you all because if you don't have a blog yet but you want to get one started, this can be a really great option for you because you don't need to add it to your existing website. And if that seems like a technical kind of big leap, check out Medium and see what's possible on there because you might be inspired and we love to repost that content from either our blog or our medium channel onto our Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. And the great thing is is that it really generates more traffic. Next is GIFs. So these are animated kind of figures so you can take multiple images or videos and merge it into a GIF file. And so GIFy is a free platform so I encourage you all to go check it out as well. And you can take GIFs directly from this platform. You can create your own GIFs and upload them to the platform or you can create the slideshow GIFs in the platform. It's a lot easier than it sounds. It's not as intimidating as it might look. And as I was saying, you can search anything that you're thinking of, putting on Twitter. A lot of times it's used for kind of funny celebrity things like movies or shows and the GIF but you can also create your own. And so you can screencast and stuff. They have an app. So just think about that. That's a great way to generate content pretty easily. Branded graphics are also good. We use these a lot. So these were created by the top ones. Right now we're created by our designers and those are, you know, if you have a graphics in-house you can definitely use Instagram and post those things. Quoted photos, another one we do. And we just started this Monday Motivation. It's a great hashtag to use. And here you can see we're just putting text on top of, this is Instagram, on top of an image. And so this is really simple to do. And you can do this actually with Canva and Adobe Spark. And these are both free platforms. So it's really non-intimidating. You don't need a designer for this at all. So this can be added to your content strategy if you have the resources. But like I said, it doesn't take an extra designer. So make sure you check out those platforms. And a tip is to focus on social media days and use tagging and posts. So on Twitter you can actually tag other organizations. So on World Environment Day we tagged a bunch of amazing nonprofits that are helping the world. And it got really great engagement as you can see. So that's a little tip right there. The kind of best practice. But also best practice is to really create a calendar and include all those social media days that are really important and gonna create a lot of traffic. So obviously call to actions and videos are also very important. So think about what action you want people to take is around advocacy, is it around fundraising? Do you have any videos existing? Do you have a YouTube? If not, would you put your videos on YouTube? Think about that. Adobe Spark also is a great platform for creating videos fast. So again, you don't need an in-house video person. We also post our webinars. So if you have webinars, you can post webinars on there. I posted this webinar right now, well, our TS30, but you can see that we also created a Facebook event. So that's kind of a good tip as well. And then Infographics, this is from our Pinterest. So you can see we saved this pin. So we always save our pins on Pinterest. So that's kind of a best practice. So if you do have Infographics, think about adding that to your content strategy. And then live videos. We recently started doing more live videos at TechSoup because it's so popular here on Facebook and now they have it on Instagram and even Twitter lets you kind of go live. So think about how you can partner with other orgs or kind of get the word out. If you partner with another org, we partnered with Global Fun for Woman in this example, you can get more shares and likes and views. So that's kind of a tip. So think about those. What kind of content can you post? Okay, so next we're gonna talk about goals. So we have a social media starter kit that Louis, our social media senior manager created. It's amazing and I think you all should check it out. We're gonna go through this in our goals a little bit here, but I do encourage you to go back and download it and reference it because there's a part where you can fill in your own kind of goals in sections. So we're gonna go through it briefly here, and then I'm gonna show you some examples. So we'll actually go into creating these goals. So some of the goals could be brand awareness. So this is the most common goal people have and this is because people think social media is a great way to grow your brand and it really is. You can really reach new audiences and get people to be more familiar and identify with your brand. So that's a great goal. Community engagement, another great goal if you're trying to get people to advocate for a specific thing and you want a community around that or you are trying to get a community of people who are advocating on behalf of your brand. So just there might be different ways if you are trying to get a law passed or something and you wanna get a group together of your top advocates. Social media can be a way to do that. So that could be a goal. Content distribution is another one. Again, if you have those blogs or you have really important information on your website, you wanna get out. You can definitely distribute it through social media. Lead generation is the process of actually generating names and emails. So identifying what type of customers that you want to reach out to and then figuring out a way to actually obtain their names and emails through. For us, it's gonna be a lead generation example is actually this toolkit, social media toolkit. You can go there and enter your name and email and download it and then that's a lead generation. And we would promote that on social and actually there's ads, you can do that as well. And then fundraising and revenue. So focus on turning your followers into donors and supporters, customer support. Are you gonna use Facebook Messenger? A lot of people these days are going on Facebook Messenger and directly reaching out to TechSoup. So best practice is to always make sure that you are responding and you have a regularly responding rate. So they kind of rate you like if you respond within 24 hours or four hours. So you really want that number to go down. So make sure you're always checking that if you do consider that to be your goal. And then influencer marketing. Do you wanna reach famous people who are going to advocate on your brand and behalf? That's another goal. And then earned media and press. It's kind of an old school way but if you wanna directly engage with the press that can be a goal. And then social media listening. We use this a lot at TechSoup. It could be that you want to make sure you understand fully the nonprofit industry, the nonprofit technology industry. So that might mean that you're constantly checking the hashtag MPTech, that's what we do. So that can be another goal. So think about these and then make sure your goals are smart goals. So that means make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. So as you're going through and establishing your goals, make sure you go back and ensure that they are smart because you never want a goal that's unattainable. And then this is again the social media starter kit. So if you download the starter kit, it actually allows you to check off which goals you want to focus on. So and it has a better kind of case study and applied goals and kind of like what metrics you could. It's a very good example. So go back through after and we're going to go through two examples now that I have, but make sure you select at least three but you could choose more than that. And these can be, you can change these and to fit your organization's need as the time goes on and just maybe your goals are three months or two months but you can always go back and make new goals. So feel free to download that and check that out. So let's go through this. So an example would be our goal is to increase brand awareness. So what does that mean? That means that you want to increase your followers. You want to increase reach and impressions. You want to increase likes, shares and retweets. You might want to increase social ads. These things are going to help establish if your brand is getting bigger on social media. And then how will you measure this? So cloud score is, I have a link there for you all, cloud score is basically looking at all your social platforms, if you're on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and then it's going to say, okay, between all your followers and all your engagements and everything like that, this is your score. And so it's kind of like your influencer score. So that's a good way to measure if your brand is going up on social media over time. Another way to track that would be natively in the analytics dashboard. So that means in the Twitter analytics or in Facebook insights, they have all their own analytics there. So you can track it just within there. You don't need an external platform, but I did list a bunch of external social media platforms that help you schedule postings, help you look at analytics. Definitely is really good for reporting. So these are a few that I think are pretty good and aren't too expensive to get started. So I think they're really good entry level. Kind of if you're just starting out and you're kind of over using the native platform, you might want to try these ones out. So I have all the links for you there. But so let's go and actually make a goal now. So at TechSoup, we say we're going to gain 150 Twitter followers and 200 mentions a month. And we can say that we're going to do this because we know from our past patterns that this is an attainable and reasonable goal. And we can measure it because it's a specific number. And then we're going to track results in Twitter in a spreadsheet and in Hootsuite. So totally okay to check things on a spreadsheet and we do that all the time. And so that's how we're going to measure it. So here on the left-hand side is Twitter. This is in the analytics platform. You can see that we're getting a lot of data here. So we can see that we can track our followers. We can track the Twitter impressions, tweets and mentions. And you can actually export this under tweets. So we can export May. And then if you look on the right-hand side, this is a Hootsuite. So it's one of those published social media management platforms I was talking about. And this is where we can dive deeper. It's a little bit more engaged. It's a little bit easier to user-friendly, easier to look at, easier to analyze the statistics and data. But you don't need this. Like I said, you can export monthly. And we do both because we like to keep track of both. So take a look at those and make sure you're always looking at that. So another goal, increase community engagement. So if we want to increase community engagement around a specific thing. So an example is we're going to host, close the gap, Twitter chat to build a community around digital gender divide and technology. So we want to get more people to talk about the digital gender divide and basically women in tech. And we're going to partner with three or more influential nonprofits and get 100 retweets and 100 likes during the chat. So that's kind of what our goal was. And we're going to measure that with a hashtag traffic or by the hashtag traffic and with using Twitter and Hootsuite insights. So here's the example. We hosted this chat and it was pretty successful. We partnered with over four nonprofits and we had a bunch of people participate and we did measure the traffic and we surpassed our goal. And that's because our goal was very reasonable from what we kind of anticipated. We thought we'd only get three but we actually got four nonprofits. So that was even better. And that's kind of why we surpassed so much farther. But on the right hand side here is a snapshot of what Hootsuite insights showed us. It tracked all of that for us. So we were able to kind of just go and see the snapshot of the day. It's a little bit inaccurate because people could have been using this hashtag throughout the day but you can always manually track this as well. It's always going to be a little bit skewed but it really does help you understand how well you did. So as you can see here, our top mention of the month was by Women Who Code who's one of our partners in this chat and for May that was top mentioned. So it was a really good engagement. Okay, so after that you're gonna go back after you've kind of chosen your goals, you're gonna go back and see like, what is your organization capable of doing? What resources do you have for these goals and how can you select the right channels? So again, look at our social media starter kit. I'm just gonna briefly go through this now but basically we have a list of kind of benefits of each platform, an example of what types of goals are good for the platform, what kind of content works well and what things you should consider. So go back through this, take a look at this and on the right hand side we added Snapchat which I didn't discuss earlier. Keep in mind that Snapchat is a younger generation so if you're trying to reach that older audience it's not gonna be ideal for you. So I don't suggest worrying too much about that one and focus more on Instagram than that might have that larger audience in the future. Okay, and remember your important brand, you know, voice on social. So here's a few that I'm just briefly gonna walk through but again this is in the starter kit and you can see that you wanna think about your character and persona so how are you portraying yourself on social media and what kind of tone are you using? Are you honest? Are you cheerful? TechSoup we try to be not so formal and we try to be honest of course and we try to be cheerful and fun. What kind of language do you not say specific words? Do you not spell your organization a specific way? Do you wanna be playful? Do you wanna fun or do you wanna be more to the point? Make sure you establish that and then your purpose. So what do you wanna do on there? Do you wanna motivate people, educate people, inspire, engage? So a lot of these you might actually say well we wanna do all of these but make sure you establish this because as you have different people managing your social maybe you have more than one person you really want everybody to be on the same page with the way your brand is being looked at because it's a huge point of contact people might find you there before they go to your website. And lastly is that you want to optimize. So metrics are very important and just keep in mind that you can fail and you try things and you learn from them at TechSoup many times have had posts that get one like or zero likes and honestly this is something that happens especially today is we get more and more users on social media. We find that every org is kind of struggling to stay afloat on there and get the likes and shares they like because it's too competitive. So don't beat yourself up about it. It's all about testing and that's what every social media person should tell you because everyone's always just testing and iterating and learning from that. So metrics are huge, huge, huge. So most popular posts weekly at TechSoup we have a meeting and we talk about what posts perform best and sometimes we even look at the least performing posts and we try to analyze that. So I suggest for best practice you do the same. And then for post timing on the right hand side here if you are getting started and you haven't really posted yet you can take a look at some of the best times to post and this blog piece on Sprout Social has a list of kind of every platform. So you can start there. There's kind of the average time when the most amount of users are online. It's kind of a pro tip. And so you can start there but then your users might be different. So if you're posting on the East Coast time if you're posting global you're really gonna have to think about what time your audience is on and the analytics within each platform should also tell you that. So after you've started posting you can go back and look at that. Also think about the frequency of your posts are you posting five times a week on Facebook? Are you posting twice a day? Kind of keep an eye out of what's performing the best and test that. And then media types also be testing that out. Of course images and videos are performing the best on social media so try to use those as much as possible but test it out. See why one video or image does better than the other. And then make sure you test out your call to actions. If you're just starting I suggest maybe having a contest in partnering and kind of test that out and see if that would work to get more people engaged. And then of course test stories and lives. Stories is just an Instagram but if you do go to Instagram and you post make sure that you do a story that day too because it kind of gets people to notice it more. So that's a huge new feature that is great for getting more exposure. So I'm just about finished here so I'm gonna leave you with hopefully some time for questions. I don't know if we have few minutes but if anybody does feel free to also tweet me if you have questions in the future that's my Twitter there. And if you wanna learn more about social media fundraising feel free to check out this blog post here and then all links from these slides are in the TechSoup course. So feel free to go back and reference all of those and send me any questions you have. And thanks so much. Great Molly, thank you. Very quickly, we still have about two minutes so I did wanna open up the floor for any questions throughout this presentation. I have been rapidly chatting out all these amazing resources. Molly and I are in the same room. So for the past few webinars we've been able to share the space so we can kind of queue each other. But I wanna make sure those of you that are on the platform right now this is your opportunity to ask Molly any questions. You can of course tweet her later or connect with her at any point but we do wanna leave it open for you. We've given you a lot of resources for you to both I guess kind of dive into more detail about metrics, about creating goals also about demographics. There's a lot of really good information there. This is kind of the second in a series of events about social media. So if you're interested in some of the other topics Molly mentioned Spark was a program that she did back in May. So there's a half hour webinar if you go to May, 2017 and click on the second tab and you'll see it's Spark and you can learn more about Spark. And we also had fundraising tips using social media two weeks ago. So we hope you check those out as well. It is important to us that you give us feedback. Right now we have a lot of folks coming to these events and we want to make sure that we engage with you. You have opportunities to ask questions. The chat box is right there for you to feel free to chat anything you want. Also complete the survey. Just go to the week that we're in right now, June 20th. Click on that module and you'll see the survey is right in the middle. You can complete it and forward it back to us. Then that way, Molly and I give you that see what else we can do better or what you should do differently to meet your needs. As always, you can reach out to me as well. I'm Susan. I'm with Texas Training and Education Manager so you can feel free. My email is also in the course. Anything else you want to add, Molly? Feel free to send us your social media channels once you get off the ground with your own social media kind of strategy and start having more platforms. Feel free to send it to us and we are happy to follow and engage with you on social media. So we're all in this together. So also check out TechSoup's social media channels. We have every channel. So whatever one you're on and let's let's engage. Let's get social. And thanks so much for joining us today. All right, thanks, Molly.