Why to use social media if you're an NGO
Today everyone is using social media for their own interest, whether to get their point across, read the news or promote activism. Social media is a great platform to connect with millions of people around the globe and get them to read your content. If you are an NGO and need to connect with your followers to tell them about your events and spread your awareness about a certain topic. Twitter and Facebook is an awesome way to spread the word online. Millions of people use these social media platforms every day. The way you can promote your organization and spread your beliefs about is by starting to go online and see what is trending that day and how can it relate to your organization. You must see what type of crowd you are trying to reach. So as a NGO you are trying to reach the crowd that cares about the similar social issues your organization is trying to bring aware of. Twitter is the best way to do that. Twitter has trending topics every day and millions of people browsing through those trending topics each day. So, you can start building that audience by being active on twitter, so you can build your followers. With using twitter the more likes and retweets you get on your tweets the more your following will get bigger and more people will know about your organization. Your main goal by using these social media platforms is to connect with a large audience spreading across the globe. How can you build your following? Building your following online is not as hard as it seems. It’s all about connecting with your audience and see the type of audience that is following your organization.
Today with one simple hashtag can change everything Hashtags have started social movements around the globe. Back in April 2014, 270 School girls were kidnapped from the Chibok Government Secondary School by a extremist group called Boko Haram Terrorists in Nigeria. So when people online heard about what happened in Nigeria they started a hashtag called #BringBackOurGirls. This hashtag got so big, everyone was posting about it. There were millions of people using the hashtag around the world. Even former first lady Michelle Obama used the hashtag, because of this hashtag people around the globe knew about the kidnappings in Nigeria. If you you’re your organization wants to bring awareness to a certain problem that’s going on you should try to create a hashtag about the problem, to get your followers engaged and try to get your followers to tweet the hashtags so their followers can tweet the hashtag and this can travel worldwide to millions of people. Most people don’t even get their news on news television networks any more, they get it from there Facebook timeline and twitter timeline. So, if you want to show awareness about childhood refugees or poverty in a certain country the best way is to engage your audience is try to connect with him personally and try to add a visual effect to the post and make an infographic with the post. This is about some people are visual readers and this helps them connect with the cause more personally. With just one post you can change someone's view on a certain topic. As NGOs when we are using social media that is our main goal, connect with our readers and keep them informed on what is going on in society and keep them updated on our organization.
So, as you can see Technology is getting bigger and bigger every day around the world and the best way to connect. So even if you are a new NGO and just starting out. Start building your social media small and make a plan on what you want your readers to read or not to read.
Do you want to branch out online? Why do you want to branch out online? To branch out online is the best thing for your organization. More people will know more about your organization and your social movement. When people want to more know more about social movements the first thing they do is go to social media. Through social media more people will know about your NGO and what they stand for. NGOs play a big role in delivering relief and promoting social and economic development. So the best way to do this through your facebook and twitter account. For example, if your NGO is having a event, make sure you have a social media plan ready before the big day. Make sure your team in the communication department is set on what social media account they will run and make sure to hashtag event to get outside sources to join the hashtag. While posting about your event on social media make sure not to lose your audience, make sure to tell them know what is happening and what is happening. Make sure to ask your audience question to keep them engage. There are three part strategy goals, first, make sure to increase conversation and make your audience enthusiastic, second, help promote the message or the cause of the event and third reaching new people who might not of heard of this event or topic. When posting in different social media platforms, there's different ways you can use it. For example when posting on instagram, make sure to take the most high quality photos, to keep the audience very excited. While posting on facebook you have to make sure the most is very informative and at the end of the post always have a call of action.
Bousso Diouf | intern in the Communications Department of
