You’ve no doubt heard the advice that posting photos will help you get more reach on Facebook. That advice has been tried and true for years, until now.

According to a study by SocialBakers, photos now get less organic reach than videos, links, and even text updates. In fact, videos are now the king of the News Feed!

Socialbakers analyzed 4,445 Facebook Pages and 670,000 posts between October 2014 and February 2015. They discovered that videos now get more than twice as much reach as photos (shown below).

There’s no clear reason for this recent Facebook algorithm change, but Socialbakers offers two explanations:

1. Facebook is responding to Pages looking to game the newsfeed with photos.
2. Facebook is taking on YouTube as the king of video content.

Jan Rezab, Socialbakers CEO, told Business Insider: “Video is proving to be a very engaging format and gaining in popularity, consumers really like them. Therefore we’d advise marketers to include video as part of their content strategies.”

How should your nonprofit respond?

• First of all, check your reach report in your Facebook Page Insights. Specifically, analyze post reach by type between October 2014 and February 2015, the period of time Socialbakers analyzed.
• Second, consider stepping up video content.
• Third, consider publishing blog posts on your website. This way, you’ll be armed with a Facebook Page AND your website, in your Facebook marketing action plan.

What do you think?

The post Photos no longer get more reach on Facebook appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why your benchmark depends on your organization

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, organizations, social enterprises, small businesses, Facebook administrators.

Are you familiar with the term virality — at least how it’s used on Facebook? Of the overall number of people who read an update on your Facebook page, virality refers to the percentage of people who then liked, commented on or shared it.

For example, if 1,000 people saw a photo you posted on your Facebook page and 100 people liked, commented on, or shared it, the virality rate would be 10 percent.

Because virality highlights how people talk about your posts, it’s essentially a measurement of content quality. The more relevant and interesting your update is, the higher your virality will be for that update.

What is good virality?

It seems like everyone wants a quick answer on this one.

The challenge is that every single Facebook page community is very different. Each community responds to content differently on Facebook. Some communities are more social than others, and each community is also at a different stage in maturity.

What all communities do have in common is that they respond more to content that’s awesome and ignore content that’s boring.

And if you’re like most Facebook page community managers, publishing awesome content is something that you’re always looking to improve.

Ignore virality benchmarks

Let’s say NTEN suddenly announced that its latest study showed that 10 percent is the average virality for nonprofit Facebook pages. You might feel really great (even arrogant) or really crappy depending on your page’s average virality.

So in the end, a good benchmark for virality is this:

Better than your most recent best.

The post What’s good virality for my Facebook Page? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Here’s an easy step by step to glossy custom tabs

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Facebook administrators.

If you’re looking to create a custom tab for your Facebook page that has complex features, like a donation page or petition, watch my 5-minute video above for an approach that’s fairly easy.

All you need to do is:

1. Create a secure Web page on your website that includes the features you want to render in a custom tab.
2. Eliminate your website header and navigation menu on that page.
3. Add the Static HTML iframe tabs app to your Facebook page.
4. Use the Static HTML iframe tabs application to create an iframe for the page.

(You’d think Facebook would make this a little bit easier.)

Have you created custom tabs on your Facebook page?

The post How to embed a Web page in a Facebook custom tab appeared first on Socialbrite.

Great images boost your place in the news feed

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Facebook page administrators and users.

Facebook launched an enhanced news feed that’s rolling out to all users in the next weeks on both mobile and the Web.

The enhanced news feed now allows users to tailor and focus more easily on specific feeds:

• All Friends: a feed that shows you everything your friends are sharing.
• Photos: a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and the pages you like.
• Music: a feed with posts about the music you listen to.
• Following: a feed with the latest news from the pages you like and the people you follow.

What does this mean for your nonprofit?

The enhanced news feed means that you’ll have more engagement, but you’ll also have more competition.

More engagement: One of the biggest changes in the enhanced news feed is the size of photos. They are huge! This will create more photo views, comments, likes and shares.

There is also a new following feed that allows Facebook users to see all of the updates from every page they follow. I personally doubt many Facebook users will view this feed, but people who do use this feed will be more intentionally engaged with the updates.

More competition: Up until now, photos were competing against text updates and links in the news feed (in addition to other photos). Photos, which have 39% more engagement than text-only updates, had a clear advantage. But now those same photos will be competing for attention with other photos in the photos feed.

Here are five things you can do to compete for attention more effectively in the new news feed:

Post better photos

1The photos feed means that you need to post photos that are even more remarkable and relevant to your audience. This will allow you to stand out against other pages that are also posting photos.

One way to instantly improve your photos is to make sure they all tell stories, like this one:

Promote your best photos

2Go to your Facebook Insights and filter your page posts by photos, and rank them by virality. Every couple of days promote one of your top 10 photos to fans — yes, it costs a bit of money, if you can afford it. This will give your top photos even more likes, comments and shares, which will in turn generate more organic viral reach, which is way better than paid reach through Facebook ads.

Make your page beautiful

3Whenever Facebook receives a new coat of paint, users tend to explore a lot more, which can give your page a fresh burst of new visitors in the short term. Make sure you upload a new cover photo, fill in gaps in your milestones, and weed out boring content. This will increase the likelihood that visitors will engage even more with your page content.

Be useful and present

4Because users can now view all pages they’ve ever liked in the “Following” feed, unlikes will spike in the short term, especially for pages that boosted likes with fan gate contests, but failed to be useful. Make sure that you publish content that is useful, and also work hard to create useful discussions within your posts by replying to commenters.

Build a stronger fan base

5Leverage your email list, your website and other social media channels to build a stronger, more engaged Facebook fan base. You should also promote your Facebook page as a secondary action for new donors and subscribers. This strategy will always win out in the long term, regardless of how Facebook’s news feed changes.

What do you think about the new news feed?

The post 5 ways to dominate Facebook’s new news feed appeared first on Socialbrite.

Sweepstakes, deals, contests & more as a way to stoke engagement

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, social media marketers, Facebook administrators.

Guest post by Mike Gingerich
Tabsite

You’re on Facebook because you want engagement, right? But you don’t want engagement purely for its own sake.

You want to be on Facebook because an engaged Facebook community translates into more leads, more donors, more customers & more sales for your nonprofit or business.

Put simply, more engagement means more volunteers, subscribers and donors. Research data reported by Vocus notes that 79% of Facebook fans are more likely to purchase from a brand they have liked. Thus, pursuing more fans and deeper engagement with existing fans is a valuable priority.

But how do you get more engagement on your Facebook page? There are a number of ways. You can:

• Create highly shareable content
• Post more images and videos
• Post succinctly at key times

And you can also run promotions. But you need to choose the promotion type that fits best with your goals. Here are four promotion types that Facebook fan pages can run:

Sweepstakes

1A sweepstakes is a chance-based, easy-entry promotion that fans enter by completing a simple form with their name and e-mail. Winners are drawn randomly after a set date.

As with most Facebook promo apps, a sweepstakes can be “Like-gated” so fans have to Like the page in order to access the entry form. (And don’t be scared by the word “app”; on Facebook, an app can be a simple form.)

Pros of using a sweepstakes:

• Low barrier to entry (simple form completion)
• Works for a wide variety of industries
• Pages can capture key user information – important for future email/location marketing

If you run a sweepstakes, you can limit each fan to a single entry or allow fans to enter repeatedly.

I recommend allowing fans to enter daily because it ensures the most continued engagement — it incentivizes the fan to return to the page day after day.

Sweepstakes promotions can work for a wide variety of businesses — including B2B and B2C.  They help:

• draw fans to the page to enter
• boost viral sharing — if the app has a sharing mechanism that increases entries.

Deals and coupons

2A deal or offer is another promotion type with a low barrier to entry.

Here’s how it works:

1. A Facebook page asks the fan to do something.
2. When the fan completes the task, she is given access to the deal.

For example: “Like our Page to access this 40% off coupon”

Other examples (and app offerings) include (1) sharing a post on your Facebook news feed or (2) sharing a post on a friend’s Timeline to access the deal.

Like sweepstakes, deals are useful because:

1. Fans respond to them.
2. It accomplishes a task helpful to the organization (e.g., more page Likes).

Pros of using a Deal app:

• Low barrier to entry (simple task completion)
• Expands reach to additional social networks — which can help the page reach a wider audience or other type of audience than currently reached on Facebook
• Works for a wide variety of industries
• Pages get something of value in return — such as further exposure, a Like, or an e-mail address for their list.

Contests

3A contest is different than a sweepstakes or a deal in that it requires more effort & skill from the fan to enter. For example, the fan has to take a photo that meets certain requirements to enter.

Instead of a random drawing to determine the winner, contests select a winner via:

• voting by the public
• judging by a select group

While photo contests are the most common type of contest on Facebook, there are other types too, like videos, essays or photo captions.

Pros for using a Facebook Contest:

• More opportunity for engagement

Contest entrants engage via their entries, of course. But more importantly, new users and potential fans come to your page and engage by way of viewing and voting on entries — which can add up to some serious reach, exposure, and interaction on your page.

Another option for a contest is to consider a two-stage process. This adds the benefit of a initial round of voting and then the need to return to view and vote again in the final round.

Entrants are motivated to share with friends

Entrants want more votes — so they extend the reach of the contest to their network of friends by asking for their votes.

This social sharing by entrants to their friends both (1) increases the contest’s reach and (2) functions as a positive referral mechanism. The entrant’s invitation to friends to vote adds trust & credibility to the page — and to its products and services.

Better qualifying of entrants

Making entrants meet a certain criteria for entry acts as a sifting mechanism. It adds a barrier for those who just enter any promotion because it’s easy & they might win, regardless of whether they’re interested in your business.

Depending on your contest’s entry guidelines, this process can serve to qualify or pre-screen entrants as potential customers.

Access to user generated content

If your promotional rules make it clear that contest entry materials can be used by your company in the future, the contest can be an excellent method of getting user-generated content relevant to your brand — and useable in future social marketing.

Note: Contests may not work for industries or businesses that don’t lend themselves to this type of engagement. For instance, it might be a stretch for a medical practitioner to run a photo contest due to privacy concerns or relevance.

Multi-network social promos

4A multi-network social promotion is a promotion that involves Facebook and at least one other social media platform — such as Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram.

Similar to a deal, the fans are asked to accomplish a task and upon completion they are then given access to the deal offer. The difference is that the task is centered around doing something on a different social platform such as Pinterest or Instagram.

In this case the fan comes to the Facebook page and the promotion is outlined. The fan then accomplishes the task — such as adding a image to Instagram with a certain hashtag or using a integrated pin tool to pin a image to Pinterest.

Some apps allow images to be pulled in from the other social network to appear on the page tab.  Otherwise the image can simply stay on the other social network.

Either way the fan has engaged with your Facebook page and simultaneously extended information about your brand to another social network.

Pros for using a multi-network social promo:

• Extends brand to more social locations — This type of promotion can work great for a company whose audience is active on more than one social network — or for an organization looking to continue gaining Facebook traction but also expand visibility on Pinterest, for example.
• Image driven – Images are powerful in social media and a multi-network social promo using images can capture the attention of viewers and invite sharing and comments — all of which boost visibility & drive referral traffic.
• Suitable for a wide variety of businesses — A multi-network social promotion can work for apparel firms to credit unions, venues to radio stations and more.

Bonus tips for running successful promotions

1. Keep the entry form simple — too many fields will cause fewer entries.
2. Make the prize relevant to your company – an iPad is not relevant if you own a craft store.
3. Ensure the prize value equates to your product – a $30 gift card for $600 watches is not a motivating deal
4. Keep the contest moving  – don’t run a month-long contest. The attention span of a Facebook fan is short. They won’t keep track of an entry and vote daily for 30 days.  5-7 days is a better span or perhaps 10 days if it’s a two-stage (initial and finalist rounds) contest.
5. Set voting to one time per day for contests — this encourages entrants to get voters to come back each day — a perfect situation for your page!
6. Know your target audience – is your target audience using Pinterest or Instagram already?  If so, a multi-network social promotion could work well.
7. Ensure the process is seamless– make sure the promotion is doing the work for you and giving the user the best possible experience. Apps integrating OAuth (sorry, technical term!) for log-in or other integrated means to access the service directly (without the “open a new browser window” issues) are critical. Fans should be able to arrive, understand, and complete in short order.

Promotions for Facebook pages offer the power to draw fans in, boost page engagement, and accomplish tangible marketing goals — like increasing e-mail list numbers. Deals in the form of coupons and discount codes will always be an attractive means to help increase traffic to a page and encourage visitors to begin a fan relationship with the page.

While not an end in themselves, contests and offers can be part of a larger marketing strategy and a key piece of helping a business grow their social community.

The post Create a winning promotion for your Facebook page appeared first on Socialbrite.

The dos and don’ts of hosting a Facebook contest

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Web publishers, marketers.

If you’re confused about Facebook’s terms for promotions and contests allowed on your page, you’re not alone.

The other day I received an email from a subscriber asking about this specific example:

The terms clearly say you can’t use a comment, like or share a as a condition of entry to a page, like the above example.

But the Facebook Terms of Service aren’t that clear about liking a page:

Liking a page IS all right – This part of the Terms of Service seems to say liking a page is fine: “You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page.”

Liking a page is NOT all right – This part of the Terms of Service seems to say liking a page is not fine: “You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.”

Scott Ayers had this to say in a recent discussion about this language: “I take it as meaning you cannot require someone to comment, like or share a post. But you can require they like your page to see the contest via an app.”

Use a third-party app for entry

The best way to make sure your contest abides by Facebook’s rules is to use a third-party app. Once they see your app (after liking a page), users can then enter the contest via the app. ShortStack has an excellent contest app.

In other words, you can require that they like your page to see the contest app, whereby liking the page simply displays the contest app. Then they enter the contest by filling out a form or using Facebook Connect.

This approach also makes sense because then you acquire emails in addition to engaging Facebook users. Remember: Building your email list is essential!

Have you run contests on your page?

The post Facebook Page contests: What you can and can’t do appeared first on Socialbrite.

Photo courtesy of cambodia4kidsorg via Creative Commons

Break out analytics into five separate reports

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, Facebook administrators.

Facebook Insights for Pages provides critical data about activity around your Page and your Page updates. It’s like a GPS device guiding you towards successful interactions on Facebook.

Facebook breaks down its analytics into five reports that can be viewed directly on your page:

1. The Overview Report: An overview of how your page is performing day to day, with sortable post-level details.
2. The Likes Report: A report about the Facebook users who like your page.
3. The Reach Report: A report about the Facebook users who see your page content (organic, viral and paid reach), what websites are referring traffic to your page and more.
4. The Talking About This Report: A report about the Facebook users who create content about your page, and how those stories generate viral reach.
5. The Check Ins Report: A report about the Facebook users who check in to your Facebook Place on their mobile device.

Going beyond Facebook Insights

The five reports listed above provide more than enough data to navigate toward most destinations. However, there are times when you want deeper insights around your page. That’s why Facebook allows you to do a full data dump (up to an 89-day range) of all your Insights data.

Following are examples of some of the data unavailable in the standard Insights reports that you can view by exporting data:

Page level data:

• The number of people each day who saw your page content
• The number of people each day who engaged with your page
• The number of people each week who engaged with your page
• The number of stories each day created about your page
• The number of stories created about your page over the past 28 days
• The number of people each day who liked your page who are also friends with current fans
• A breakdown of how people have liked your page each day (through a Like Box, on the page, in a hover card, etc.)
• The number of people each day who saw your page or its posts from a story published by a friend
• Data on post impressions. Impressions are the number of times a post is displayed, while reach is the number of people who saw those posts.

Post level data:

• Date and time an update was published
• The number of people who saw your post in a story from a friend
• The total number of impressions each post received
• The number of people who gave negative feedback on your post
• The number of people who hid your post
• The number of people who reported your post as spam
• The number of fans who saw your post
• The number time your post was displayed to fans
• The number of stories about your post by fans

How to export your Page Insights

You can export either page level or post level data from your Page Insights simply by clicking the Export button on the top-right corner of any of your Insights tabs, and selecting page level or post level data, the date range you want to analyze and the format for your export (as shown above). Insights data is not available before July 19, 2011.

The post Dive deeper into Facebook Page Insights appeared first on Socialbrite.

Understand the nuances of Facebook ads to find the best fit for your objectives

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

Facebook ads differ from almost every other type of Internet ad in at least two important ways:

1) Facebook ads target the interests expressed by users in their profile details, the pages and groups they like, and updates they post on their Timeline (new job, new relationship, new baby, etc.).

2) Facebook ads also scale word-of-mouth marketing to a massive degree by leveraging the recommendations between friends – a network of 140 billion connections Facebook calls the “social graph.”

Nonprofits and other organizations considering Facebook ads can look at this summary of four different types of ads, with an example of each, plus a handy chart at the end of this post:

Marketplace ads

1A Marketplace ad is an ad located in the right-hand sidebar of Facebook on desktop browsers (not available on mobile devices).

Marketplace ads allow you to include a headline, body copy and image. If you’re promoting a Facebook page, a call to action for liking the page appears below the ad.

Marketplace ads can be targeted to any subset of Facebook users.

Sponsored Stories

2A Sponsored Story is a story about a page, event or app that appears in the news feed (Web and mobile). The content for Sponsored Stories is derived from stories generated from people who talk about your page or RSVP to your event.

For example, if you’re advertising an event, stories about people RSVPing to the event would appear as a Sponsored Story in the news feed.

Page post ads

3Page Post ads are posts from your Facebook page that you can promote to existing fans, friends of fans and even non-fans. These ads appear in the news feed and in the sidebar of Facebook (on the Web).

The main difference between Page Post ads and Sponsored Stories is that Page Post ads can be shown to anyone on Facebook, regardless of their connection to your page.

Promoted Posts

4Promoted Posts are Facebook’s answer to the novice marketer who may not have any experience using Facebook ads or those who just prefer to advertise in the simplest way possible.

Promoted Posts are Facebook page updates that you can promote to existing fans or fans and their friends, simply by using the “Promote” feature located under every update on your Timeline.

The other main difference is that you only pay for reach based on a flat rate for various different ranges of people. In many cases, Promoted Posts seem to have the highest click-through rate of all ad types.

An explanation of all four Facebook ad types

Click here for a larger downloadable version

Advertising objectives

Before you spend any money on Facebook ads, you need to determine what your goals and objectives are.

• Do you want more Facebook page fans?
• Do you want more exposure for your page posts?
• How will you use ads to build your email list?
• Who are you trying to reach and what do you want them to do?

Having very clear answers to these questions will help you spend your ad money wisely.

Which Facebook ads have you tried for your nonprofit? Did they work?

The post 4 kinds of Facebook ad types compared appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tailor your Facebook campaigns to ask for a Recommend, Sign, Vote For, Support, etc.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Guest post by Drew Bernard
Co-founder, ActionSprout

For years I have grumbled about the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow organizations to access the email addresses of their own fans. And perhaps you’ve heard of how the company has been treating organizations like frogs in the proverbial pot, slowly reducing the number of fans they deliver updates to in their news feeds. The idea that nonprofits have to pay to get an update onto a meaningful number fans’ walls — now down to an average of 15 percent — may be good business for Facebook, but the value proposition to organizations has become less and less compelling.

At the same time we’ve seen organizations (perhaps yours?) struggle to engage with Facebook supporters in meaningful ways using the few actions Facebook has provided: like, share or comment. I’ve had lots of discussions with nonprofit officials about the real cost/benefit of Facebook as a platform for reaching supporters and deepening engagement with them over time.

Despite all this, I think Facebook finally has the pieces in place to make a major impact on organizations’ ability to acquire and build productive relationship with supporters. That’s right: At the very time Facebook is working harder than ever to monetize, I have become a believer in its ability to make a difference. In fact, even their recently introduced Promote function provides nonprofits and campaigns with a compelling new tool for engaging your most ardent supporters.

Changing Facebook’s default functionality

Here’s why. Earlier this year Facebook rolled out its new Open Graph functionality, and my colleague Shawn Kemp went about looking into how it might be used to help organizations acquire high-quality fans on Facebook and, more importantly, build productive relationships with those supporters over time.

After months of learning and developing, we launched ActionSprout to help organizations unlock their Facebook fans with actions that move beyond like, share and comment. The Facebook app gives organizations dozens of nonprofit-relevant social actions to engage supporters with directly on their own Facebook pages.

For instance, instead of asking people to click “like” on a wall post, they can now ask them to click Recommend, Thank, Sign, Vote For, Stop, Contact, Support or one of a dozen other actions we currently support.

Referral rates: Leveraging the Open Graph to do good

Over the past few months we’ve been working with a few organizations and campaigns to put the system through its paces and discover what kind of impact it can have. And now we’ve introduced one of the most important pieces of the system: the back-end analytics dashboard.

One of the key metrics we obsess over is the referral rate that organizations are experiencing from their ActionSprout campaigns. Simply put, when a person takes an action like Join or clicks Like on the post itself, do any of their friends join them? Facebook’s new Open Graph is designed to support the viral growth of highly relevant actions. Whenever a person takes an ActionSprout action on behalf of an organization, the app fires the Open Graph and automatically shares that action with some of their friends. We also give action-takers other ways to help spread the word. But until you start seeing real traffic through an app like ActionSprout, there is really no way to know just what kind of referral rates to expect.

Case study: ActionSprout and the David Suzuki Foundation

One of the first organizations to run tests to measure referral traffic for ActionSprout was the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian foundation working to protect the diversity of nature and Canadians’ quality of life, now and for the future. The results have far exceeded our expectations.

The foundation launched its first campaign with the specific goal of testing the performance of ActionSprout relative to their standard campaign sign-up process (which drives people to a form on their website to complete a sign-up form). The call to action for all posts was to join the Fall Family Challenge by clicking a link. The link on their first post drove people to the organization’s standard Web form, not their ActionSprout app. This first post resulted in 125 people signing up for the campaign. As would be expected, the vast majority of these 125 people were fans who received the call to action from their news feed.

“The results from that are meaningful,” says Sarah Hall, the foundation’s communications manager. “After all, we can now reach out directly to each of those people via email and build deeper relationships.”

Two days later, the foundation posted a similar call to action to its Facebook page. On this post, the call to action link pointed to their ActionSprout tab. That call to action drove 119 fans to join the campaign. But the really interesting part was what happened after they started seeing fans take action. For each fan who joined the campaign through ActionSprout, the organization has seen another 1.8 people who were not previously fans join the campaign along with them.

Where did these people come from?

• Each time a person took the action, it fires an open graph story that is shared with some of their friends and gets aggregated on their timeline. That means an open graph story is getting posted to their wall and timeline for 100 percent of action-takers.
• After taking an action, the Foundation has ActionSprout configured to give the action taker a quick post to wall dialog. In their case, over 75% of action takers shared the action.
• Finally, because this campaign was targeted at families with kids, many of the foundation’s fans chose to like and share the post but didn’t sign up themselves. Some number of friends of these sharers chose to join the campaign as well.

In other words, for every 100 fans who joined the campaign through the ActionSprout app, the organization also acquired 180 new campaign members, for a total of 280 campaign members.

Supporters connecting directly to an organization’s work

The thing that excites us and the David Suzuki Foundation is that those new people didn’t just click like because they wanted to give a wink to a friend who was up to something. They joined a campaign that directly connected them to the organization’s work. These people are new to the foundation, but already Sarah and her colleagues know how they relate to their work and can begin to serve and engage them accordingly.

The David Suzuki Foundation also uses Salesforce as its CRM (constituent relationship management) system, and has ActionSprout set up to automatically add or update contact records with names and email addresses of any person who joins the campaign. (This feature is available starting on our mid-level $90/month plan.) During the two-week campaign, the David Suzuki Foundation added several hundred new constituents to its database.

The other day the foundation launched an ActionSprout campaign to persuade supporters to apply pressure to Stop a potentially disastrous China-Canada trade deal that the prime minister negotiated behind closed doors. This campaign has sees similar referral rates and but with much higher overall numbers. The Stop campaign saw more than 3,000 people take the action in under 48 hours.

Isn’t this the kind of stuff we should have been able to do on Facebook from the start? We are excited to continue to see what organizations do with ActionSprout. Please drop me a line for more information.

The post ActionSprout: Engage supporters beyond like, share & comment appeared first on Socialbrite.

Build your fan base with a more interactive website

The purpose of your website is to encourage people to take action. Period.

The actions may vary – like joining an e-mail list or donating money – but regardless of the specifics, your website’s value consists of the end actions it elicits.

Two critical areas of action that your website should be encouraging are:

1. Asking people to share content from your website via social media.
2. Asking people to like and follow your organization’s online presences.

The reason why these two areas of action are critical is that they help build your fan base, amplify word of mouth and increase traffic to your website.

Let’s take an example:

Someone finds your website in a Google search and decides to share a very useful article from your blog. If they share it on Facebook, the resulting visits are essentially by word of mouth. If they shared on Twitter, the resulting visits are people interested in the topic of the article. In either case, social sharing will eventually result in new email supporters, donors, etc.

Following are six ways you can make your website more social. Keep in mind that the ease or difficulty of making these changes may be related to your technical abilities and your website’s software — but also your nonprofit’s culture and staffing resources.

Create awesome content

1There’s a reason why you’ve heard this a million times. People don’t share boring content. And even in the rare instance where someone does share a boring video or a blog post, it won’t get that far anyway.

You owe it to your people and the cause to become the best creator/curator of content you can be.

Add sharing plug-ins

2If someone has to copy the URL from your website and paste it into Twitter in order to share it, you’re uninviting people to your party.

The Digg Digg plug-in includes all the major social media sites, and then some. The folks over at Buffer own this plug-in, so you can bet that it’s very reliable. And if you don’t use WordPress for your website, check out their Buffer Button.

Add Facebook’s social plug-ins

3Websites that integrate Facebook’s social graph tend to have much more traffic and loyalty.

Facebook plug-ins allow you to easily add a variety of different Facebook features to your website, like social comments, a recommendations bar and even a Facebook log-in. A WordPress plug-in is also available.

Use huge images

4Lately it seems as if people are sharing photos more than ever before. Pictures of cats (of course), politicians and even pictures with just words are going viral.

Why? Well, there are two reasons:

• A picture takes up more visual “real estate” in the news feeds
• A picture says 1,000 words (except for pictures that have only words)

People are more likely to scan, read and share an article on your website if it has an attractive image that goes along with it. They’ll take that image and pin it on Pinterest or post it to Facebook. Read this post for optimizing your website for Pinterest and this one for Facebook.

Invite people to connect

5Instead of sticking your social media presences in a sidebar or below the fold, dedicate a single page on your website site for social connecting.

A great example of this is a recent project by Goodwill in San Francisco that has a space for people to connect with each other on Facebook and Twitter. Users can even submit photos to be shared on Pinterest.

Something you can do right now? Add a Facebook Like box to your website, which allows you the ability to display the faces of people who’ve liked your Facebook page.

Acquire emails with Facebook Log-in

6Many email marketing services, like Aweber, offer a Facebook connect option for their Web forms. The Facebook Log-in feature makes it easy for people to join your e-mail list simply by authorizing with Facebook. In most cases, the opt-in form is pre-populated with their name and e-mail. Check out an example on this page.

In the next installment of this series we’ll talk about stats you should always be tracking to determine how far off course (or not) you are with your website’s goals. If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to the series here.

The post 6 key ways to make your website more social appeared first on Socialbrite.