Why Nonprofits Should Schedule Social Media Stories
Haywood Marketing Communications is a Nonprofit Connect Business Premium Member. HMC helps nonprofits tell their story to attract donors, recruit volunteers and raise funds through digital marketing. Learn more about their services.
Stories on Instagram and Facebook get more engagement organically than content on your news feed. More than 500 million people engage with stories on Instagram every day. Half a billion people upload stories to Instagram daily.
The Value of Stories
I'm pirating these statistics from Hootsuite:
* 58% of people say they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories
* 50% of people have visited a website to make a purchase after seeing a product or service in Stories
* Brand Stories have an 86% completion rate
Instagram stories are a great way to tell your story of the impact your nonprofit. I work with a nonprofit that serves in over 150 countries. I created a series of "recap stories" of the work the nonprofit did in a specific nation. The stories had pictures and short videos and they generated more engagement than the content on the news feed.
Another nonprofit, attracted 300 million views to Instagram stories to raise awareness of the Holocaust. Mati and Maya Kochavi are descendants of Holocaust survivors. Mati is a tech entrepreneur who launched the project with his daughter, Maya. The father-daughter team was concerned that the story of the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis during World War II were being forgotten.
They created a visual diary based on the short life of a teenage girl who died in Auschwitz at age 13. They posed the question, “What if a girl in the holocaust had Instagram?” They told Eva Heyman's story based on her diary. She was a Hungarian Jewish girl who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. They told her story in a 50-minute film rolled out as 220 Instagram stories. The stories attracted 300 million views in 48 hours and 200 million Google searches.
How to Schedule Facebook Stories
While a nonprofit may not have the resources of a tech entrepreneur for a major undertaking such as the Eva Stories project, Instagram and Facebook stories are a great way to showcase the stories of people impacted by your work. With the tool, these stories can be uploaded and scheduled ahead of time in batches to save you time!
You can plan an Instagram or Facebook story to:
- launch a fundraiser
- explain your services
- recap an outreach
- report progress on a fundraiser
On Facebook, Hootsuite reported that 500 million use Facebook stories daily. Adding stories into your content mix for Facebook will help boost engagement with your content organically. Facebook recently rolled out way to schedule content for stories for your nonprofit's Facebook page and Instagram account through its Business Suite.
Here are the steps to scheduling stories through Facebook's Business Suite:
1. Go to your nonprofit's page.
2. Click on "Publishing Tools" on the left side of the page.
3. Click on "Business Suite" or "Try Business Suite"
4. You should see the "Stories" icon on the top right side of the screen. Click on stories.
5. Upload your photos or video. Your video can't be any longer than 15 seconds.
6. Click schedule or publish!
I hope this helps you out!
Leilani Haywood, Owner of Haywood Marketing Communications
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