Working With Social Media
by Jessica High

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, gives some basic tips on using various forms of social media.

1)      Facebook—Sreenivasan highly encourages people to establish levels of privacy on Facebook. You have to remember that everything you put on your Facebook will be available to all your friends if you do not set up boundaries. Sreenivasan says, “Whatever you do on there reflects on you.”  Facebook has done an excellent job of providing many options for you to customize ‘who sees what’. These options should be utilized that way you can solidify the real-life relationships you have with those people.

2)      LinkedIn—this is another network where you can post your profile as a business person. It is important to keep this profile up to date and complete. Google search results now pick up LinkedIn profiles so if you have very little of your profile completed, it will not be useful.

3)      Twitter—Sreenivasan encouraged organizations to “look through your top prospects and see what kinds of people are open, out there and sharing ideas.” Twitter is the ideal place to do this. There is a superabundance of ideas, links, and thoughts available. Sreenivasan suggests that “No more than one in three of your Tweets should be about your organization. The others should add to the conversation.” People ultimately want information, and if you provide that, they will follow. “If you become a good source about articles in your field, you’ll find donors will follow you, “he says.

All of these networks are important because they drive traffic back to your organization. It is important to create curiosity, the sense that you are developing something worth following. Continue to refine your social networks so that you can invest in people.

 

Additional information taken from NonProfit Times article “Getting Familiar Via Social Media”

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