Content is fire; social media is gasoline.
– Jay Baer, Bestselling Author, Marketing Expert and Founder of Convince & Convert.
The above quote reflects on the fact how content is the lifeblood of social media. And content becomes trivial (no matter how good it is) if you do not distribute it effectively and if the right audience does not consume it.
Unfortunately, most organizations either pay too much attention to creating content or distributing them on social channels – that is, posting. In contrast, the cornerstone of success lies in the delicate balance between content creation and content distribution.
This essentially brings us to the most crucial question to which this blog is dedicated today. What matters when it comes to social media success – posting quality content vs churning out more content?
Let’s consider this scenario to conclude the answer.
Your nonprofit social media strategy revolves around increasing followers in the next quarter. After a series of posts, maybe even creating a string of high-quality content, you fail to achieve your objective. So, what do you do? You try harder. You increase the frequency of posts thinking that this might help.
Conclusion: You end up bombarding content in your audience’s newsfeed so much that they unfollow your page, and perhaps you even lose on quality.
Source: Giphy
Your audience must see your message seven times before they believe your offer as per the marketing rule. This is true for any advertising campaign to convert customers, in your case – converting supporters into donors. To achieve this objective, charity marketers must focus on distributing content on social networks because that’s where your potential donors spend their time the most – more than two hours per day!
Here are some ways to find your safe haven (read: middle ground) for balancing quality and quantity on social media.
1. Consider the 80/20 rule
Social media gurus recommend posting 3-5 times per week. But it also depends on the platform you leverage to share your information. You might want to tweet more frequently on Twitter and go a little easy with LinkedIn or Facebook. But no matter how many times you post, follow the 80/20 rule.
People log on to social media because they seek connection. They want entertainment, inspiration or information related to topics that matter to them. As per the report by Global Web Index, “funny and entertaining” content followed by the desire “to fill up spare time” is the number one reason people use social media. So spare them from ads and promotional content related to your campaigns! Sure, those are important too but put them subtly and in intervals – spread promotional content evenly along with other engaging posts.
By providing helpful content to your audience, you’re able to give them something rather than just asking them to donate. This retains peoples’ attention long-term and builds a meaningful relationship paving the way forward for a sustainable fundraising strategy.
2. Spend less time on high-quality content
Think high-quality content means investing a lot of time in the front of the computer? Not really! Once you identify what your supporters expect from you on social media, you can easily optimize your posts by:
a. Creating pillar content and breaking them down into chunks of meaningful posts.
b. Maintaining a library of reliable and valuable sites to source content regularly. Check out pocket if you haven’t yet.
c. Resharing trending posts within your niche. You don’t have to invent the wheel every single time.
d. Maintaining a content calendar to be consistent on social media
e. Using a social media posting and scheduling platform like Hopeful to balance frequency and measuring results.
3. Know your algorithms
On a recent Tropical MBA podcast, online writer David Perrell talked about growing his Twitter followers from 30,000 to 160,000 in 2020. The key to his success has been giving the algorithm what it wants, such as Live videos, high-quality images, etc. However, he says, “all art is a balance between what the artist (you) wants, and what the medium wants.”
According to David,
Posting whatever your heart desires will lead to slow growth of traction and will not outsmart the platform’s algorithm.
Contrastingly, stat-obsessed algorithm marketers will indefinitely see results, but that will lead to a soulless path to content burnout.
The balance lies in between.
Although David talked about his experience with Twitter, the same principle holds for all platforms. Know your algorithms and find the balance!
Hopeful has helped several nonprofit organizations with their social media efforts. With our intuitive dashboard, charity marketers have been able to post consistently, while gaining insights into crucial metrics to achieve their objectives. Learn more about Hopeful’s features to propel your social media efforts by requesting a demo today!