What Is Good Social Media Content for a Nonprofit?

Why Shares Are Better Than Likes

Here’s a secret: it’s great to get social media “likes.” It shows your partners are engaged. Your audiences are engaged. Great!

But there is a bigger goal you should aim at, generically speaking: you want shareable content. A “share” or “repost” is worth far more to your nonprofit than a “like.”

Here’s the idea: your nonprofit will endlessly experiment with social media content. That’s just a basic requirement of doing social media well. As you experiment, you’re trying to do a few things. One of the things you’re trying to do is create content that goes viral (at least, a little viral). You want content that spreads across the internet for the best reasons. That happens via “shares,” not via “likes.” 

Shares do a few things for you that are difficult to do for yourself. 

First, shares amount to an endorsement from whoever shared the content. And as you surely know, when someone who loves your nonprofit tells others about your nonprofit, that’s very powerful. People trust their friends more than they trust an organization. 

Second, shared content is free attention for your nonprofit. You’re letting the “social” part of social media do that work for you.

Ok, here’s a tip you can use in applying this lesson: content that is shared by one person is closer to content shared by dozens of people. Chances are, you’ve made a lot of content that gets likes from your followers. But as you experiment to crack the code of shareable content, an early sign that you’re experimenting in the right direction for dozens of likes is when you get one or two likes. Keep making content like that. Learn what is shareable about that post, and use that insight to improve. 

One more tip: 

What categories of content are more shareable? Check out this blog post for some quick tips on that front.