content-promotion-tips

Content Promotion Tips for Nonprofits

It takes a lot to publish great content – from researching, writing, editing, consulting with a subject matter expert, creating supporting graphics, optimizing…There are lots of steps. 

Your content will not get results if you simply hit publish. So, it only makes sense that you have a good promotion plan. 

You may not promote all of your content, but a lot of your content will need a promotion plan to help generate brand awareness and interest for your organization. 

 This post will cover some of the popular channels for nonprofit organizations. 

Social Media

Social media is one of the easiest and most obvious means of promoting your own content. Whether you’re active on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, depends on your audience persona and where they’re most active.

Establish some guidelines for your brand voice on each channel and identify types of content, hashtags, messaging, and engagement strategies for each channel that are consistent with your overall content strategy and appropriate for each social community. 

Even when you are sharing the same piece of content, you will want to position it slightly differently in your messages for each social channel. For example, you can post to Twitter more frequently and with a greater degree of repetition. Community involvement posts are very appropriate for Twitter and Facebook. But on LinkedIn, take a more conservative approach; it’s a more buttoned-up, professional environment. YouTube is primarily a place to house your videos and present another way to be found online. 

Paid Social

To reach your target persona on social media, you should consider incorporating social advertising, such as promoted content on Facebook. The appropriate time to invest in paid social is when you have high-value content that you are confident will interest your persona.

SEO

It goes without saying that you should always follow SEO best practices. If you’re using WordPress, we recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast SEO makes it easy to identify your target keyword, make sure it aligns with your page title, meta description, and more. 

PR

When you publish truly newsworthy content (such as research) spread the word with a formal PR campaign. There are several good PR distribution services online. We recommend eReleases

Outreach

When your content is particularly share-worthy, reach out to some relevant influencers and let them know it exists. If you don’t have a network of influencers, tools that allow you to connect with influencers can be expensive. Try FollowerWonk to find influencers on Twitter for free. 

Sometimes a shortcut to tap into influencer networks can be to collaborate with them on content creation, including an interview or a comment from them and a link to their site. If they have some involvement, they may be more inclined to share. But before you approach them, be sure you have a compelling answer to their “what’s in it for me?”

Content Discovery

There may be opportunities to re-post some of your blog posts on worthy sites with a broader or different audience. Free syndication opportunities do exist, but may not be a good fit for your needs. Paid content discovery services that may be worth exploring include Outbrain or Taboola or their new combined entity.

If you need help with a content promotion strategy, consider enlisting help from an expert.