Why would your organisation want a social networking presence?

A Social Networking page is a useful way of creating and maintaining contact with a wider audience who consume their media, research information, and connect with others online.

More and more younger people in particular, use social networking sites as their main means of communication. “21 million Facebook users worldwide and the site is adding 100,000 new users each week” (Facing up to Facebook fears. BBC, 9 May 2007)

It is also a great way of advertising your service and being another point of contact in the online space. By maintaining and refreshing your social networking site it will show up on your “friends” pages and will hopefully keep them looking at your page and connecting to your website.

Further resources

Guidance on how to decide whether social networking is relevant for your organisation:
www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page7935.cfm

 

This series of articles on Helium discusses why non-profit organisations adopt social web strategies and how they can do it:
www.helium.com/items/804297-how-nonprofit-organizations-can-adopt-social-web-strategies.

 

The site also has a debate on whether investing time/money/resources to adopt social web strategies is worthwhile (so far there are no articles to the contrary):
www.helium.com/debates/102593-nonprofits-is-investing-timemoneyresources-to-adopt-social-web-strategies.

 

'12 Tips for Nonprofits On Getting Started With Social Media' is adapted from Sarah DiJulio and Marc Ruben's People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities, (Wiley, 2007) - a guide to getting started with social networking:
http://nonprofit.about.com/od/socialmedia/tp/Tipsstartsocialnetworking.htm