How Facebook's Updates can Boost Your Cause

Over 800 million people will discover new ways of sharing information and expressing themselves online. Facebook has been rolling out significant updates over the past week, and there's plenty more to come. But what does this mean for nonprofits on Facebook?

Nonprofits are champions of rallying people around a cause, and understand the power of personal stories and word of mouth. You know that it's not simply about the message you have, but the reason why you have that message in the first place. When your community speaks, their friends listen. When your community is moved to action, others watch. When your community stands up for your cause, others are inspired.

Now more than ever, Facebook gives you the platform to mobilise a force of advocates for your cause.

Two reasons why you need more engaging content

The latest updates are all about making Facebook more personal again. People will be more engaged with each other through filtered news feeds and the continuous ticker. To aid this, Facebook will be playing its own part by highlighting important or interesting stories from those their connected to. This means it's even more important to be sure that your content is engaging and being shared by your community.

Timeline, Facebook's massive personal profile overhaul, will also highlight significant moments in their Facebook experience over the years. If your community members are as passionate about your cause as you are, if they're getting involved with what you doing and if they're sharing your content, then your cause will have a higher likelihood of appearing on their Timeline.

The key to the new Facebook for nonprofits is having a community who identifies with your cause and shares your content.

How can my nonprofit organisation make the most of our Facebook community?

Facebook will no longer be about social networking, but social living. The changes mean that more information will be shared at a greater rate, making it important for your organisation to be more visible. The best way to do this is to get your community to share.

Share great content

The first step to getting people to share your content is to simply have good content to start with. Post content that's relevant to your community, matches your message and is in their language. This might be blog posts, news articles, case studies, photos from your events, videos. 

You don't have to share your content only either. Sharing stories from other websites or organisations that may have a similar message. It's always good to have a balance of content. By sharing other people's content, you help in shaping a bigger picture of issues your organisation is addressing. Another great source of content is from your community itself.

Help your community share their stories

Sharing photos or blog posts from your community members is powerful. Encourage your community to post stories in the form of photos, videos and links to your organisation's Wall. You could then use that content as a source for round-up blog posts or community stories. You could even use a service like Animoto to bring photos and videos together into a single presentation.

Watch what's popular

The new 'share count' is brilliant for keeping track of what content is being shared, who's sharing it and what's being shared. By looking at which of your items is being shared the most, you'll get a better understanding of what's resonating with your community.

What's even better is that when people share items via the share button, it will reference back to you! This will naturally drive traffic back to your page as people see your organisation highlighted on their friends walls.

Use new Open Graph apps

The new Open Graph system will be the most influential change made to Facebook since it launched. Basically, over the next few months we'll start seeing new things being shared and highlighted in our news feeds - as they happen. The driving force behind this will be a new style of Facebook app which assists people to share more information more often - in real time. For example, you could see who's listening to an interesting podcast or watching an interesting video right now and join in. Your organisation could tap into these new types of real-time apps in many creative ways.

Just Ask 

Why not simply ask? Ask your community to share your content. It's important to you, and it's important to them. Ask them to spread the word and even ask them to ask their friends. Social media is all about word of mouth, so encourage your community to share your news, your fundraising campaign, and your cause.

Facebook's changes will be making social media more personal once again. Now, more than ever, it will be important for your nonprofit organisation to find ways to use their presence on Facebook as a way to not only engage their community but to mobilise them as advocates for their cause.

Image thanks to dtweney