From a marketing angle, you may consider social media to be very important to your organisation, and it is of course. However it is a bit like preaching to the converted if you think about it. It is not likely someone will find you on social media unless they already know about you. So that means the audience you are sharing your social media stories with are already fans and followers. It is a way of keeping in touch.
Many organisations I work with have strong social media presence, but not such a strong presence in the news on the website. Is this a problem? Well yes, I think it might be. Here’s why:
Do you want more people, or the same people?
Ask a marketing professional and they will always want more people exposed to a story or message. Particularly that group that is not currently engaged with the organisation. Within that group might be future; donors, contributors, volunteers, members etc. That is really what is important. Of course you do not ignore those people that have signed up or following you already. We are talking about a superset of people, not just regular engaged fans.
Work smarter not harder
So, let’s be clear here, this takes a little more effort, but over time it will be much less effort, and you will reach far more more people.
Without exception, if I look at the statistics of those sites that have a rich and varied news feed, they also have high numbers of visitors. There are some technical reasons for this in terms of how the website works. But let’s keep this simple.
Here is a new strategy
Get your social media guru to add things to the website first. Do what they were intending to do in a post on your website rather than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
That in itself gives you an advantage over twitter because you are not restricted on your content. When you have added the item to your website post. Display the post in isolation from the news page. (When you view it on the news page with other posts, you need to click the image, title or read more link to open it). Now copy the URL or web address for the item in your website.
Next go to Twiter, and paste it there. Then go to Facebook and paste it there. Both systems will try to grab something from your website. So you don’t have to rebuild it all in Facebook, Twitter et al.
Now you have met the requirement to keep your fan base in touch with what is going on. However it will also drive up your website visitors as a result. For those people that happen to come across you while surfing the web, they can see it too. They would have missed it before if it is exclusively on social media.
Check your results
Most of you have a Google Analytics panel on your dashboards, you can see and monitor the results of this change if wish. The net result in terms of effort, is you create it in one place only (your website) and do not need to recreate it any where else. Everywhere else including feeds you simply add to, you just paste the URL. When you do this, you will see a big spike on the number of visitors to your website. Many of those will be first time visitors. Some of those will also become fans too.