Social Media Posting Guidlines for Nonprofit Organizations

I knew that a lot of organizations don’t know where to start in terms of a social media posting strategy. I also knew that we could use a constant reference ourselves. For this reason, I created this one-page social media posting guide to serve as a helpful free resource to anyone on the web. Feel free to download or share this online or off, we just ask that you follow the instructions for sharing at the bottom of the guide.

The guidance here is for regular organizations that do not have full time social media staff or unlimited resources and thus aims for maximum impact with the limited time you have. Scroll down past the guide to view links to official translations and other useful information.

Social Media Posting Guide by Craig Van Korlaar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. With these guidelines in mind, feel free to repost, share, and print.

Keep in mind…

• There is more to social media than just posting content (listening, engaging, monitoring, copywriting techniques, etc)
• I’ll be creating more resources that expand on the concepts in the future, so be sure to subscribe to updates via email or rss.

FAQ: What time zone do the recommended times apply to?  For those of you in the United States that have a national audience, you will want to use Eastern time as this is where nearly half (48%) of the US population lives (Eastern + Central = 81%). If your audience is primarily local or regional, treat it as local time.

Planning and Scheduling
For those of you who are interested in a breakout of the planning and scheduling components of this resource, I’ve summarized them below.

Monthly: Planning

• Content strategy planning session– Identify what’s coming up. Schedule campaigns
• Define Key messages – Define key messages for campaigns & events
• Use an editorial calendar – Can be as simple as a shared google doc or calendar

Weekly: Content Creation

• Batch content creation – Maximize time. Minimize mental gear shifts
• For Twitter, Schedule (or plan to add later) at least one post per day
• Using scheduling tools like Hootsuite – Tip: vary timing slightly and avoid :00 and :30
• Use analytics with your links – Insight, good. Dashboard obsession, bad.

Every Other Day

• Post to Facebook – Best frequency to get and keep likes

Daily

• Post to Twitter at least once a day – More is better and vary times slightly
  • Best CTR: 8-9am, 2pm, 5pm, 3pm* – (test for yourself) Worst times: 1-7am, 10am-1pm, 6-7pm
  • Best RTs: noon-4pm – (test for yourself) Worst times: Before 10am and after 7pm
  • Space out your tweets – No more than 1 or 2/hr (excluding @replies) Buffer is a great tool for this.
• Check feeds at least 2x per day – If only 2x, then mid-morning & late afternoon

Weekends

• Post on the weekend – People are less busy which means greater click through rates but less retweets and shares