It can feel challenging running nonprofit social media and trying to grow your online following. The truth is, many people in the nonprofit world feel stuck when it comes to social media and they don’t know how to make it work. 

From the outside, social media is any website where people can post content or discover content: Text posts, pictures, quirky videos, anything. From the inside though, the goal of social media companies (Facebook, Instagram, you name it) is to increase user engagement. “User engagement” is just a fancy phrase meaning get more eyeballs and clicks — aka suck up more time. Social media companies, platforms if you will, increase user engagement by putting valuable content into people’s feeds. The value of content is determined by how much engagement it generates measured in:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Views
• …and other stuff

The most valuable content gets shared more widely by the algorithm because, whelp, people seem to like it. Sure enough, a few popular posts can get a profile real momentum. It becomes a self perpetuating machine. 

What does high value content look like to advocacy organizations and nonprofits and how do you create it? Post stuff that’s valuable to people who care about advocacy issues. It’s common sense, right? But the people who struggle to build a following don’t fully get how much of their content is dry and pasty fluff. It’s not useful or even very human. But your audience sees a lot of fluff every day and they’ll only read the juiciest bits. There’s always more words scrolling by.

Here are some specific questions to consider:

• Was the content actually usable? Maybe with a list of action items that could be followed?
• Was it super timely, referencing something blowing up in the news cycle?
• Was the content related to famous people? Yes… even social justice warriors like me click on famous people.
• Was it counter intuitive and pithy? A human getting bit by a dog isn’t news, but when a man bites a dog? That clicks.
• Was it a hero story? Hero stories are emotionally gripping tales about a person who overcame great adversity. People love that stuff.

So takeaways? Focus on your audience: What do advocates care about? Make stuff sticky: detailed and otherwise hard to execute “how to’s” and human interest topics are great. Then look at your past results to plan your next post.