Social media is an invaluable tool in every modern impact business’s marketing arsenal. Social platforms allow you to reach an extensive audience instantly on a global scale, significantly furthering the reach of your social cause’s efforts.
Social entrepreneurs who aim to address some of the world’s most complex issues can use social media to tell their stories, raise awareness about their cause, and garner support for their pursuits. Websites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all offer you the ability to interact in real time with customers, supporters and fellow causes. This enables you to market your enterprise, and perhaps even partner with other organizations that share your vision.
But how exactly does a social enterprise market itself on social media? How would an impact business or initiative design their digital marketing campaigns in a way that engages people and accurately conveys the importance of its work?
Here are some tips on how social entrepreneurs can use social media to their advantage to market their social enterprises and gain valuable support.
Determine Your Goals
The first step to drawing up a successful social media marketing strategy as a social entrepreneur is to decide on the goals of your marketing campaign. These goals will determine your future decisions about your marketing efforts.
Are you aiming to create awareness about your business or a specific cause? Do you want to enhance your credibility in the digital space, or build a base of loyal supporters? Are you seeking donations, customers, or content shares?
Whatever your goals, it’s essential that you outline them clearly. Your goals should be specific, measurable, realistic, attainable, relevant to your cause, and guided by clear timeframes and deadlines.
Choose Your Social Media Channels
Every major social media channel on the web today is unique, and each one offers specific perks and benefits for impact businesses.
Facebook connects users to other people, business pages and interests in order to facilitate online communication between them. Twitter is usually used as a hub to share news, humor, and relevant updates. LinkedIn is a professional platform that encourages direct interaction between business owners and enterprises. Instagram is designed to facilitate communication and engagement between businesses, influencers and customers.
You need to choose which site will best suit your marketing goals and enable you to reach the right audience and support in order to meet those goals.
Determine What You Will Be Promoting
There are two key aspects of every social enterprise: the business itself, and the cause it aids. Most emerging organizations promote their organizations themselves, instead of the causes they support.
Marketing your organization is important, but you might not make personal connections if you do not spread the word about your cause as well. Social enterprises should share stories, images and videos of their charity drives, field visits and achievements with their social media followers in order to gather the support they need.
Create Your Content
Your content is the most crucial part of your social media marketing strategy. It needs to be clear, informative, effective, and meaningful to your audience. Concurrently, it must incorporate keywords that will get it ranked on search engines and improve the visibility of your content online.
Many social entrepreneurs use hashtags and categories to get their content seen by the right people. These features add structure to content and organize it around specific topics, while enabling people interested in those topics to discover it. Most social media platforms support hashtags, so consider adding a few relevant ones to your posts. Use appropriate hashtags such as #conservation, #communityupliftment, #feedingthenation, or anything else that applies to your cause to ensure that supporters who already follow similar drives see your posts.
Your social media posts should be brief (around 3-4 sentences for most social platforms) and easy to read. Remember to post plenty of engaging visual content alongside your written content. Every post you broadcast should contain pictures, videos or graphics that raise awareness of your cause and encourage your followers to spread the word about what you do.
Post Regularly
Posting too often—or not often enough—can quickly alienate your supporters and even lead people to unfollow your social media pages. Content creation is time consuming and can be expensive as well. So, if you don’t have enough content about your organization to post at least once a week, try implementing a curation strategy.
You can check out the content of similar causes to your own. Summarize it and share it on your own page to keep your audience engaged and raise awareness about other worthy impact businesses in your field. This creates a win-win situation for all involved, as it drives traffic and keeps your audience coming back for more interesting content.
Monitor Your Social Media Traffic
Once you’ve posted content on your social media pages, it’s important to regularly monitor the traffic you’re generating. Doing so will give you an idea of how effectively your content is engaging your audience, and what posts they’re most eager to read or view.
There are several reliable websites like Netbase Quid, and social platforms’ built-in analytics tools that will assist you in tracking your web traffic, hits, likes and referrals to help you structure and adjust your content in the future.
Prioritize Proselytizing
The four P’s of marketing—Product, Price, Promotion, and Place—will not necessarily pertain to your social impact business, especially if you have no products or services to sell. Here, focus on proselytizing instead. This involves gaining as many evangelists and supporters as possible, who will gladly spread the word about your organization and your cause to others.
Social media has significant potential, especially because there are so many people eager to play a role in developing and assisting good causes. Social platforms are the tools you can use to connect your business to those people and ensure that you get the help you need to meet your social goals.
The Social Advantage
Social media marketing isn’t just for eCommerce stores and brands looking to grow their customer bases. Social entrepreneurs can use social platforms to raise awareness about their impact on businesses and the causes they focus on, while gaining valuable support at the same time.
This is a cost-effective and highly efficient marketing option for non-profit organizations, who may have limited marketing budgets. It’s also easy to manage and maintain. All it takes to connect with an enormous online community is a few clicks of a mouse.
Social platforms offer a central hub for providing free updates, collaborating, gaining feedback, and proselytizing on both local and global scales. Relationship building in aid of worthy social causes has never been easier.
