Social Media Strategies GuideBy: Jacqueline Logan, Allison Lansing, Sara Dunco, Kendall Pritsch, Ryan Berry, Morgan

Hasler

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction 2

Part II: Instagram Best Practices 2- 5

Frequency 2

Storytelling 3

Increasing Followers 3 - 4

Engagement 4 - 5

Theme 5

Hashtags 5

Part III: Facebook Best Practices 6

Frequency 6

Length 6

Content 6-7

Hashtags 7

Engagement 7-8

Part IV: Twitter Best Practices 9

Frequency 9

Content 9-10

Engagement 10

Hashtags 10

Tags 11

Part I: Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to provide Food Finders Food Bank with recommendations on the best way to reach their goals through the use of social media to target their three audiences. Food Finders’ audiences include their donors, their clients, and the community.

Food Finders Food Bank hopes to increase the amount of engagement they receive on their social media platforms, learn what type of content should be posted to which social media platform, and understand how to grow their following among individuals who do not live in the Tippecanoe county.

Part II: Best Instagram Practices

This section of the guide is dedicated to providing recommendations on how to best use Instagram to achieve Food Finders’ goals.  

Frequency

It is important to post often to keep your followers interested. However, posting too much can overwhelm your followers and cause them to them to develop a negative attitude towards Food Finders and even unfollow Food Finders.

Plan out posts in advance and stick to a regular schedule. A good rule of thumb is to post once or twice a day. Choosing a consistent posting schedule is important, so make sure to choose a schedule that you can realistically maintain.

Find out the best times for Food Finders to post using Instagram. First select the Insights icon on the top right corner of Food Finders’ profile. Navigate to the Followers  section of Insights page. Look at the graph to see the time of day that Food Finders’ followers are active on Instagram and post during those times.

Storytelling

The content Food Finders shares is a representation of the Food Finders’ brand and should tell a story. Telling a story is a way for Food Finders to appeal to their followers on a personal level and also visualize how they personally fit into the Food Finders’ story.

When an event is coming up, post about the planning process before the event, what happens during the event, and what happened after the event to give followers a full narrative of the event.

Tell the stories of people involved with Food Finders including, employees, volunteers, and clients if they are okay with it.  Post an image of them and a meaningful quote related to what they do at Food Finders.

Post content that inspires people at Food Finders relating to Food Finders’ mission and values. For example, this could be an inspirational quotes or a success story from the national news that relates to the Food Finders brand.

Update followers on exciting things that are happening at Food Finders such as a group of volunteers, a special event, a partnership, a class, or a program.

Increasing Followers

Increasing the amount of followers Food Finders has on Instagram will increase awareness of the resources, foods, and events offered by Food Finders’ as well as the volunteer and donation needs Food Finders may have. Listed below are strategies Food Finders can use to increase their followers.

Connect your Instagram account to your other social media accounts and post content directing your followers to your other platforms. For example, post a link to an image or video on Instagram account to your your Facebook feed. Followers who like you on one platform will be more likely to like you on multiple platforms.

Be aware of social media trends that are relevant to Food Finders. For example, post content relating to national holidays or trending topics online.

Follow and engage with Instagram accounts that are relevant to the Food Finders brand. For Food FInders, this could include local businesses and organizations, food bloggers, as well as other food banks and non profits.

Ask questions that prompt your followers to tag their friends. For example, Food Finders could post about an upcoming volunteer event and ask followers to tag three friends that they would want to volunteer with.

Ask volunteers and clients to follow Food Finders’ social media accounts when they visit the Food Finders facility.

Invite a guest to host a social media takeover on Instagram to take over posts and Instagram story for the day. We recommend starting with an expert who is comfortable with a social media. We also recommend establishing how the guest will promote the takeover, how many posts the guest will make, what they are allowed to post and what they are not allowed to post. The guest should also be available to engage with the followers.

Engagement

Engaging with followers is an important aspect of social media as a whole, especially Instagram. Engaging with your followers is a great way for Food Finder’s to communicate with their audience and it also helps to increase the likelihood of people seeing your posts.

Responding to comments or liking comments is an easy way to engage with your followers.

Asking a question for your audience to reply to is another easy way to get people engaging on your page. Food Finders does a good job of asking questions on Instagram, but one thing you could do is make the question be posted on the same day each week.

Creating a challenge for followers to participate in on Instagram is another great idea - pairing with different departments at Purdue University is a great way to create a competition between students while still helping raise awareness and increase volunteers at Food Finders.

Post often to keep your followers interested! Creating a shout out to a specific user for something they have done is another great way to engage with followers. Food Finders right now does a lot of Shoutouts for people that work there, so one thing you could do is expand that shoutout to individuals in the community.

Tagging other accounts relevant to what you are posting like @feedingamerica is another good way to engage with followers.

Theme

Having an Instagram theme is posting images that maintain a consistent aesthetic. An Instagram theme is a great way for Food Finder’s to communicate its brand to its publics and grow its followers. Instagram themes are easy to maintain and will give Food Finder’s social media channels a professional, cohesive, and branded look.

The same filter should be used on every image. A study by Simply Measured found that Lo-Fi is the most popular filter used by brands on Instagram and Valencia attracts the most engagement from users. Additionally, 60 percent of photos posted on Instagram by top brands use filters.

Images should be high quality and cropped to be the same size and shape.

Images and content should be relevant to the Food Finder’s brand and follow a pattern. Posting images of the same types of content will build trust between Food Finders and its publics because Food Finder’s followers will know what kind of content they can expect to see.

Hashtags

Incorporating a hashtag that aligns with Food Finder’s brand is a great way to keep your Instagram uniform. Hashtags are important because it allows users who are not following your account to see the content that you are posting on Instagram.

Social Mention is a great tool to utilize because it actually allows you track what is currently trending on social media.

Aside from using the common hashtags for Food Finders, it is a good idea to hashtag what is trending on Instagram that day because it will help you gain more followers and traffic on your page.

Use hashtags sparingly! Only use keywords that are relevant to the message you are trying to get across.

Part II: Facebook Best Practices

Frequency

Posting on Facebook is important to keep your followers informed and engaged.  However, similarly to Instagram, posting too much can overwhelm your followers and cause them to them to develop a negative attitude towards Food Finders and even unfollow Food Finders.

Be strategic about your posts and plan them out ahead of time and create a schedule. Try to keep your posts per day to two or less. According to Kissmetrics, an analytics, marketing, and testing blog, studies have shown that Facebook pages that post just twice a day receive 40% more engagement than pages that post 3 or more times a day.

Find out times when your followers are most active on Facebook. You can do this by first, clicking “Check out Page Insights” on the Admin Panel, then select “Posts”, and lastly select “When Your Fans are Online”. This will show you a graph of when your followers are most active. A general rule of thumb found by Kissmetrics is that you should post at noon and just after 7 pm.

Length

Facebook is a great medium for posts of all lengths. However, it is important to know what length is going to maximize engagement. Posts that are too long can become just as overwhelming as posting too frequently, and can get lead to Food Finders followers ignoring posts or even unfollowing the Food Finders Facebook page.

An ideal Facebook post length for maximum engagement is 40 characters. This means that posts are brief and do not contain maximum content. With this, it is not surprising

that most Facebook posts do not hit this mark. It’s important to know: the shorter the better. Posts should be aiming for around 80 characters.

Content

Facebook is a medium where you can share multiple types of posts. You can posts status updates, photos, share links and videos, and so much more. It is important to know what types of posts your followers are more inclined to enjoy so you can optimize engagement.

It is important that the contents your posts are meaningful. Meaning, if you post a photo it must serve a purpose and relate to the context of the post.

After looking at the variety of posts, we noticed that when Client Spotlights were being posted, that those kinds of posts got more interactions than several posts about events.

Doing Facebook Live drives three times more engagement. A Facebook live of a class or an event coming up or thanking donors.

Hashtags

Hashtag use on Facebook is different than the other social media platforms. According to, Social Media Today the use of hashtags can be useful for events or promotions and with proper support of other media. It is not believed that hashtags are that beneficial when it comes to regular content.

For various events throughout the year, it would beneficial to create a hashtag for the event. If the event is annual, it is encouraged to continue to use that hashtag for the following years as well. It is also suggested to use consistent hashtags between other platforms.

If the hashtag is widely associated with the topic that is being posted about, hashtags can boost your reach on Facebook.

According to, Social Media Today the also suggest that when posting to not use any more than two hashtags per post and to watch and test analytics.

On Facebook the use of hashtags can lower engagement on the page.

Engagement

Engaging with followers and people that are active on the page is an important aspect of social media. Doing this can create more followers for the page, as well as reaching more people on the platform.

To find what post types return the highest engagement rates, you will follow similar steps to finding the times your followers are active on Facebook. Start by clicking “Check out Page Insights” on the Admin Panel, then select “Posts”, and lastly select “Posts Types”. This will show you graphs of what types of posts receive the most engagement. Generally, photos and videos receive the most engagement.

One of the good things about Facebook is liking a comment is interacting. Simply acknowledging that someone is commenting on the post is a good way to increase engagement with followers.

It is important to watch what people are commenting on the posts that are being made. This is important because if they are asking a question about Food Finders, it needs to be addressed.

Also, getting employees to be engaged on the page is a good way to increase engagement on your page. Having employees respond to questions or simply sharing events going on.

Part II: Twitter Best Practices

Frequency

How often one should post depends on what one is trying to achieve through Twitter.

According to Forbes magazine, if one’s goal is to increase engagement, then he or she should Tweet one to five times a day.

When one should be tweeting depends on his  or her target audience. According to Hootsuite, each Tweet reaches 75% of its potential engagement within the first three hours of being posted.

A study conducted by Hootsuite revealed that the best time to post is between 12:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, with the most engagement occurring around 3:00 p.m.

Content

According to nptechforgood, when trying to come up with content, you want to make sure that your content is useful, interesting, and retweetable.

You have to think about what your audience will want to read about. Relevance is key.

Retweeting is another good way to generate quality content.

It is also good to include links in your tweets. According to nptechforgood, tweets that have links are 86% more likely to be retweeted.

When retweeting, be sure to only retweet information relevant to you or your brand, and only share tweets that will be relevant to the majority of your followers. Again, consider the content your audience will be most likely to engage with.

Be sure to keep an eye on the analytics for tweets with some sort of media, including pictures, videos, or GIFs. This type of content often will spark an increase in popularity for an account. However, it is crucial to not overload your Twitter feed with media.

Engagement

With increased engagement comes increased responsibility. It is important to check for engagement multiple times a day and it is preferred to have an immediate response rate.

According to an article from American Express, in order to encourage engagement, it is important to tweet consistently and not at all once. This allows the audience to have time to process and potentially respond to each tweet.

That article also says that it is recommended to occasionally ask for retweets from your followers. Doing so often increases retweets, but it is important to not overuse this strategy.

Another good way to increase engagement is to ask and answer questions. This will prompt your followers to reply to tweets in order to answer the questions you ask, as well as encourage them to ask their own questions. It is important to reply to every question that your followers ask. Your followers will not want to ask you questions if they do not feel like you are going to answer or acknowledge them.

You can view the exact numbers of engagement per Tweet by clicking the three bars underneath the text of the Tweet when you are using Twitter for iPhone. When on Twitter using a laptop or desktop, analytics can be viewed by visiting analytics.twitter.com and clicking “Tweets.”

Hashtags

On Twitter, it is crucial to ensure that hashtags are being used as enhancers for tweets, not as decorations. This means that nonprofit organizations should use hashtags that are relevant to the specific posts the hashtags are being used for, or connected to the larger picture goals possessed by the organization.

The hashtags should also be relatively short, usually no longer than one or two words. According to an article from nonprofithub.org, the top nonprofit hashtag to spark social good is #volunteer. The author writes that organizations should shed light on the outstanding work done by their volunteers, and that the hashtag #volunteer can also be used to publicize opportunities for potential volunteers to become more involved with the organization.

Another example of a successful hashtag in the article is #donate. The simplicity of hashtags, especially on Twitter, can go a long way.

Finally, it is a good idea to develop consistency when using hashtags on Twitter. Instead of using a great variety of hashtags, it would be much more beneficial to consistently use a small handful of hashtags that followers can associate with your organization. This

practice can make it easier for potential followers, volunteers, or donors to “discover” the Twitter page, according to nonprofithub.org.

Tags

According to socialmediaexaminer.com, consistently tagging other accounts when necessary is one of the best ways to increase engagement on Twitter. When you tag another account within a specific tweet, this is the easiest way to ensure that the other account can easily access your tweet and ultimately retweet or quote it with more information.

However, it is also important to only tag exterior accounts when the content of your tweet is relevant to their organization or their social media platforms. Too much tagging can come off as pestering and can lead to a watered-down relationship between the Twitter accounts of the organizations.

The best strategy here is to only tag an exterior Twitter account when your content is directly related to or applicable to the organization that the other account is representing.