There are so many websites about social media — and not all of them are useful if what you’re looking for is social media for nonprofits or social justice work. Here are ten sites to start with:
Three websites to get the lay of the land:
- Beth Kanter is prolific and has a mountain of great content. Like her Best of Beth content.
- Nonprofit Tech for Good — the writer of this site, Heather Mansfield, periodically posts useful lists, like 111 Lowcost or Free Online Tools for Nonprofits.
- Mashable for general trends in social media (Warning: this site is full of fascinating distractions — you can try to stick to the nonprofit category but it may prove to be difficult).
Four fun tools to spice up your use of images and social content:
- Storify.com enables you to pull together a bunch of social media hits into one spot, so you can share multiple voices and social media sources. You can promote them on Storify.com or embed them on your own websites.
- Wondering what size that profile picture should be? This comprehensive cheat sheet for social media has every photo dimension you could possibly need for all the big social networks. Thanks, Lunametrics!
- Animoto enables you to make musical slideshows with visual effects from your photos with just a few clicks. (Tip: don’t use copyrighted music.)
- I use desktop software for image editing, but if you want a simple online editor that allows you to resize photos, add text and effects, Picmonkey.com is easy to use and not spammy.
Two tools to see how you’re doing on social media:
- Twitonomy will show you great details about your Twitter activity such as which of your tweets are getting retweeted, who is re-tweeting you. It also allows you to analyze other users’ activity as well.
- If you’re using Facebook, hopefully you’re checking out your Insights data regularly. Here’s a solid explanation based on Insights as of July, 2013 (like most of the social web, these metrics are a moving target).
One bonus link:
- LastPass. Please don’t share the same password across different social media platforms: use a service such as LastPass or something else to securely store strong, unique passwords for all your social media accounts. Last Pass has an affordable Enterprise version so that you can manage accounts for all your staff.