Sendible Blog

The non-profit world is not very different from the business world in the strategies that should be employed to connect with your base. Social media management in the the modern world is key to getting your name in front of as many people as possible, engaging them, and monitoring that engagement.

1. Know Your Base
Finding the people you should be interacting with has to be the first step in the process. You want to create as many promoters of your cause as possible to create buzz, energy, and action for it. Search social sites by keywords that relate to your mission and your brand, then follow or like them and engage them on the site to try to get them involved. A group of people with a common vision will feed off of each other and generate buzz.

2. Ask For Participants
Once you’ve identified and engaged your promoters, they can help you to spread the word of your mission and bring more into the fold. The exponential power of tapping into ever-reaching networks of people on social sites can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting the word out.

3. Tie It All Together
Utilize ever available resource and make them a seamless net. Picture a website with its pages. Navigating through the pages should be easy and uncomplicated. You should think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and any other site you use as pages on your website, wih each one linked to the other in as flowing a way as possible. Include links, badges, button, and cross-site promotion on every page. Also make sure that all your information is filled in, like pictures, bios, activities, contact information, etc. Incomplete profiles look bad. Use every site you can get on, and there are a lot. Limiting yourself to the big three (or less in some cases) is a mistake. Using sites like SoundCloud or Pinterest can allow you to reach people that may not react as well to your message on other sites.

4. Let the Funds Flow
Don’t spend all of your social networking time asking for money. It is much more effective to be real and engaging to generate interest and let the money come naturally. This is not to say that you should never ask, just don’t get pushy. Remember, $1 from 1000  people is the same as a $1000 donation from one person, except there is a much better chance of the word spreading to others through the 1000 people.

5. Monitor Your Sites
Using a social media dashboard will help you keep track of the activity surrounding your brand or mission. Even if you have a full-time person for social media management, which you should, it is close to impossible to keep a good eye on your engagement by simple browsing through. Good software will do much of the work for you so you can spend your time actually being social. It will also provide analytics that can help you to figure out what is working and what isn’t.

These days, it’s harder than ever to get your updates noticed on Facebook. Due to the sheer volume of posts hitting the news feed, there’s a good chance that your updates will be missed or simply overlooked due to all the other noise. For this reason, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your updates are noticed and acted upon. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how with 6 simple tricks, you can increase your exposure on Facebook and generate more click-throughs to your website.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

Not sure what our social media management software does? This video will help explain.

At Sendible, we have tailored our social media tool for agencies and companies to manage multiple social media accounts across clients and/or brands. This post explains how to get started if you’re a small agency wanting to manage social media for 4 clients.

1. Start by signing up for a Sendible account, by going to http://sendible.com/pricing.

2. Since you’ll be managing 4 clients, you’ll want to sign up for the Business plan, which supports up to 4 users initially for $49.99 per month. As you bring on more clients, additional user accounts can be added at $12.49 per user per month.

3. Enter your company information and complete the signup process.

4. After signing up and activating your account, sign in to Sendible at http://sendible.com/login.

5. Click on My Users to create and manage your clients.

6. To create a new client, click New User. Fill in the details for your client and click Create User.

7. After creating the user account, you’ll see a drop-down box at the top right. This allows you to switch to any of your clients and manage their accounts for them.

One of our most popular new features on Sendible, is the ability to resell and offer your own version of our social media marketing platform to your clients.

With our white label social media tool, you have the option to manage social media on behalf of your clients, or train them up and allow them to log in themselves and manage their own social media accounts.  Sendible is a great tool to help implement a social media strategy for your customers.

The way the white label site works is as follows:

• We create and host a completely re-branded site for your business/agency – with your own logo, look-and-feel – running on your own website domain, but hosted on our servers.
• We give you a control panel where you can administer your site. From here, you can manage your existing clients and create new logins for your clients.
• Your clients can log in to your white label site themselves and view reports, send social media posts, track mentions etc – or you have the option to manage things for them from your control panel.
• We create a Facebook and Twitter application for your business so that all Facebook and Twitter posts are re-branded.
• For examples of white labels we’ve done before, take a look at http://account.loopedmarketing.com and http://sbm.vertmob.com.
• There is a one-off setup fee for the white-label site which includes re-branding and indefinite hosting on our servers.

For more information, please send an email to partnerships@sendible.com or complete the Sendible white label application form here.