Adopting a winning digital strategy for your nonprofit means embracing digital marketing in all its glory - an interactive and dynamic website, personalised email marketing strategy, embracing automation and harnessing the potential of your social media channels. Over the next few weeks, our Marketing Solutions team look at how this can work in practice for a small nonprofit. This week, Faye our Social superstar looks at Social Studio.

The benefits of using social media for nonprofits are now well established. It’s a cost-effective way to build a supporter base, share your news and grow awareness of your organisation. It can also help you to fundraise, recruit volunteers, share your campaigns and connect with stakeholders.

Your charity may have been using social media for a while and are keen to develop a more sophisticated social media strategy. After regularly posting and sharing content, what are the next steps? You know listening to your audience or supporters is vital and don’t want to miss any online mentions of your organisation as these are all opportunities to engage.You may also want to spot any emerging trends or topics in your field, or keep a watch on what your competition are doing or saying.

There has been an explosion of tools on the market to assist with social media management, content creation, social listening, monitoring and analysis. The appeal of Salesforce Social Studio is that it enables you to perform all these tasks in one platform. Here are my top 5 reasons why I think it is great for non-profits.

1. One platform, one tool for global management of your social media

Social Studio offers one interface to manage publishing and planning content, engaging and analysing performance all in one place, replacing multiple tools to achieve the same result.
You can organise the structure of Social Studio to mirror your own organisation by setting up individual workspaces to reflect departments, brands or geographical regions. A charity may have regional branches, with unique social media platforms, so each region could have their own workspace, but the organisation can have access to a global view across all workspaces. High performing content can be shared with other workspaces to tailor and localise for their audience.

2. Efficiently collaborate across teams

Within the workspace, the publish tab in Social Studio has a calendar to help plan, schedule and create content. Notes can be added to the calendar, so the full team can see details of key promotions or messages. For consistency, publishing macros can be set up to apply subject labels, author name, web analytics criteria, targeting requirements. This also provides efficiencies by streamlining performance for analysing data in line with the structure of your organisation.
An approval process can also be set up, so that post can be checked before it goes live. Approval rules can be set up with a flag to check a specific author, social account, targeting region, label or advertising account, or a combination of all of these factors!

3. Live engagement with your audience

The engagement area offers a treasure trove of information to enable you to engage with your followers. This area offers a highly sophisticated tool to listen to all relevant conversations online. You can set up different social media monitoring tabs depending on your organisational structure - you may want to organise these by department, a specific campaign, product or service area, or different brands. You can set up different searches using topic profiles with specific key words and source groups.
If integrated, you can also send a sales opportunity or service issue to the team via Sales Cloud and Service Cloud CRM.

4. Analyse your social media performance with multiple reports

Social Studio offers multiple ways to analyse your social media performance. The analyse tab enables you to create dashboards specific to a social channel or specific social listening search set up by a topic profile. These dashboards enable you to analyse for a specific time period, the feed, post volume, sentiment and top words. The analytics you view are actionable, enabling you to click on a specific post and engage there and then.
At the top line organisation level you can review a post report, that includes the key metrics for a series of posts on specific social platform such as like shares and clicks published during a specified time range. Depending on your analytics or reporting needs you can set up dashboards tailored to show the information you need to see. You can download these reports for communicating performance to key stakeholders.

5. Manage your social media on the go

Social Studio offers a mobile app offering the desktop functionality in terms of publishing, engaging and analysis. It also has a fantastic ‘search’ facility that is unique to the mobile app. For any search term, hashtag or collection of key words, Social Studio will list the most recent posts for quick and easy engagement. It will also summarise the post volume to show the popularity of the topic, with a visual Wordle, so you can immediately pick up on any emerging trends or hashtags.

Need help with your digital marketing? Contact Debra to arrange a free consultation with our Marketing Solutions team.