Do you have responsibility for a Charity and their Social Media activity?
As those who follow me on Twitter will know I am a keen supporter of Charities and spend a lot of time promoting and highlighting their activities. This post look at some of the Benefits for Charities of using Social Media.
Social media is an important component to all your Charity efforts online. It’s the way in which you can raise awareness of your Charity and their activities, connect with supporters and potential supporters, and learn new things.
Social media not only gives Charities the power to reach people but it also empowers people to connect with Charities. Never before have small Charities had such a great way to connect with their clients and supporters and potential clients and supporters in such a way.
As a small Charity you can use social media to:
- Research – You can use it to conduct research on your audience as well as services that you may want to create to support people. You can see what others operating in your space are doing, and you can see what your ideal audience needs.
- Increase Credibility — By sharing your work with people via social media, given time can grow your reputation as experts in your area of activity. It takes perseverance and work to get there, but social media makes it possible for anyone anywhere to start at zero and become known through the most powerful word-of-mouth marketing too that has ever existed.
- Promote — Many social media accounts allow you to create very targeted advertisements that aren’t as expensive as you might think. You can even generate some free advertising through being active and promoting your Charity on social media.
- Connect — You can connect with your supporters as well as others working in the same area as you. You can connect with people who have never heard of you before. Many people work directly with individuals they met on the net via social media whom they’ve never met in person. It’s a very powerful medium for connections.
- Brainstorm Ideas — Stuck on any topic? Use social media to help you jump start your creative juices. Want to write a blog post about a topic but you can’t think of what to say, ask your friends, likes and connections their opinions about the topic and see if that doesn’t get you started writing from a whole new perspective.
- Conduct Surveys — You can easily set up survey using Google Drive or Survey Monkey and send it to your social media accounts for a fast response to your survey. Or you could run a Poll on Twitter to get quick responses from your connections and others on the site.
- Share Your Work — We all know that you can use social media to share your own stuff and that of your friends, followers and fans, but you can also share anything you find on the internet with your connections. This makes it easy to get the word out about anything you want to tell people about quickly.
- Inform — By writing informative blog posts or other materials and sharing them freely via social media you can inform and educate your friends, followers and everyone about your Charity’s area of work and why it matters to them.
- Learn — Finally, you can learn using social media from others who have something to say about their own area of interest. You can find mentors to learn from by typing in a keyword about your topic and viewing what the people who show up have to say.
Never before has it been so easy to connect with so many people about any topic. You no longer have to work alone, even if you are operating in a very small charity. You can get input, help, and advice from others through using social media.