Jim Hughes

If you’re in business, gaining and maintaining customers is vitally important.

If you’re a church, gaining and maintaining members is your mission.

If you’re a nonprofit, gaining and maintaining supporters, donors, and volunteers is critical.

Social Media used well helps you do just that.  It’s a highly effective way to communicate with and engage the people important to your organization.  It builds relationships, increases your influence, and promotes loyalty.

Social media is content, not the tools that publish the content.  For social media (content) to be effective it must interesting, attractive, engaging, and (sometimes) present your message.  Consumers of social media (the community) have a short attention span, so a strategy for publishing fresh content on a regular basis is a must.  If you just push the same content out again and again, the community will consider you a spammer.   The community also expects and in fact demands that you give back to the community, or they will dismiss you as well.

Reaching your audience is also dependent upon using the right publishing platforms.  A blog may be effective for some demographics, facebook for others, and twitter for still others.  Since social media is permission based — they choose to view your publications — choosing the right tool or combination of tools and using them well is critical.