April 16, 2012; Source: Mashable
NPQ has recently been examining how nonprofits can manage social media effectively with a small staff, limited capacity and a never-ending list of potential outlets (see, for instance, here). The consulting company Zintro has released an infographic on leveraging your social networks that is worth a gaze:
This infographic does a fairly thorough job of differentiating audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin. One takeaway is that Facebook is a great way to make personal connections with clients, while Twitter is a much more fast-paced environment (about 140 million tweets are sent every day). Google+ has a predominantly male audience skewing towards students and professionals in the techonology field. LinkedIn is aimed more toward professional development and is a great way to network and make groups for your organization to encourage discussion.
Another great resource LinkedIn provides—though not included in this infographic—is LinkedIn Today. If your organization is involved in publishing (and if you read Joe Waters’ NPQ column this week, you know all nonprofits should be publishing), LinkedIn Today is a valuable resource for getting online content to a much wider audience. Although there is no way for you to directly load content up on LinkedIn Today, by sharing content on LinkedIn and encouraging connections to do the same, your organization could land a hit article, blog post, etc.
The infographic doesn’t include another social media platform worth mentioning: Pinterest. The image-based, “window shopping” social network has over 17.8 million active—and largely female—users. Google+ users also appear to be flocking to Pinterest, which took third place in visitors behind Facebook and Twitter in March of 2012.
Although the constantly expanding and changing landscape of social media can be daunting, this infographic may help nonprofits get a manageable grasp on their social media strategies. What do you think of these tips for leveraging social media? Were any vital resources excluded? –Aine Creedon
