It’s important to remember that the goals of nonprofits are typically fundraising, advocacy efforts and recruiting vounteers. List building is an objective toward achieving these goals. Facebook is not the best tool for adding email opt-ins. But if you have several hundred fans on your nonprofit Facebook page, there’s your list! Use that list to help raise donations.
The idea behind social media is to go where your audience is and not to drag them to where you are. Once there, you interact with them through conversations they’re already having. Many audiences are on Facebook and Twitter.
Both are essentially micro-blogs. I know many complain about the seemingly constant changes the Facebook team implements. But these changes make it so much easier to achieve what you want to achieve. For instance, a year or so ago Facebook’s little status update — your name followed by the word “is” — became the central thread that holds together all of our interactions on the site. This status update is nothing more than a micro-blog that you publish and Facebook distributes, just like Twitter.
Just like Twitter. The rise of Twitter is what inspired Facebook to make that change. Facebook has even adopted some of the Twitter syntax. Try this: when you update Facebook, use the @ symbol and begin typing the name of one of your friends or fans. It auto-fills. That’s straight from Twitter.
Micro-blogging is all about recency (the real word is “recentness”). Your updates should be frequent in order to remain recent. But monitor the threshold with your fans. Make sure 1) you’re not annoying them with updates that are too frequent, 2) you’re contributing to conversations they’re already engaged in or initiate conversations they want to participate in, 3) the focus is on them and not you, 4) your call to action exists at the intersection of their interests and yours.
