How to create greater impact with social media in 2024

It can be hard to find your footing in the world of social media. It is an ever-shifting landscape, influenced by changes in technology, our social world, and human psychology. And 2023 has been a particularly slippery year, with over 70% of nonprofits finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of changing best practices and the release of new features across platforms. 

In their report ‘Social Trends 2024: Nonprofit’, Hootsuite explores how charities can navigate the coming year with confidence and stability. Below we discuss some key takeaways.

Build a community 

It might seem like the natural choice to directly track the return on investment of social media through financial metrics – for example, looking at direct donations resulting from each individual post.  

But Hootsuite advises that, in 2024, treating each social post like an advertisement will likely drive supporters away. It has found that, after staying in touch with family and friends, the top reason people use social media is to be entertained and, in these moments, the last thing they want to find is organisations trying to conduct a hard sell.  

Instead, social media managers should use their chosen platforms to create enjoyable content for their followers, nurturing more solid, long-term relationships as a result, and helping to drive higher return on investment in the long-term. 

“Enjoyable” can describe a variety of content, including content that is humorous, but also educational, inspirational, hopeful, or content that brings​​ about connection or finding shared experiences. Think the RNLI’s TikTok page, for example, which enlightens viewers to all the work their team does behind the scenes to save lives at sea. 

Take things back to basics and use social media for what is was originally meant for – connection and interaction. Get to know what your audience wants by making the most of social media features like polls and Q&As. Directly asking your audience what they want to see from you will take the guesswork out of the process, and can help you build trust, loyalty, and a desire to support your work in the long term.  

As you build this community of long-term, engaged supporters, Hootsuite shares the importance of using UTM codes to track conversions from this audience and integrating contact capture strategies into your social content to turn your improving social engagement metrics into an owned audience that you can tap into at any time with more direct and targeted asks.

Look beyond fundraising 

The report emphasises that charities should take a broader perspective on the purpose of social media. Its only purpose should not be to fundraise, but to build a loyal, owned audience, with fundraising acting as only one of several pillars. 

Social media creates a variety of opportunities for audiences to be generous towards charitable causes, from advocacy and campaigning to volunteering and donating items to charity shops. People are far more likely to donate money as part of a broad personal commitment to a charity, and social media offers a perfect opportunity to help people get to know the charity and become as committed as you are to the cause. 

Hootsuite suggests that the potential of social media is huge for building and diversifying relationships with donors, volunteers, and advocates, but the charities that will be the ones to capture this opportunity will be those using social media to build interactive and meaningful relationships, not the ones only focused on fundraising transactions.

Focus on fewer platforms 

It’s time to face it: you can’t be everywhere all at once. And by maintaining a presence on every single social media platform that exists, Hootsuite says, social media teams are being spread too thinly and are unable to meet each platform’s differing needs and opportunities. 

To foster a truly engaged relationship with audiences in 2024, social media teams need to be present with their communities on fewer platforms. This means they can better stay up to date with ever-changing user and advertising features, create higher quality content suited to their specific networks on those platforms, improve social media performance, and ease staff burnout. 

Conducting an audit to identify your charity’s “hero” platforms is the first step to being more focused and engaged as a charity on socials.  

Balance AI and authenticity 

With the advent of publicly accessible generative artificial intelligence (AI) in 2023, Hootsuite advises rethinking how we approach authenticity on social media. It’s not necessarily inauthentic to use AI for social media content, they say, but charities should approach with caution. 

For example, it’s important to know your audience and what they feel about receiving AI-generated content on their feeds – for example Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby boomers all have different perspectives. 

In addition, in order to maintain a sense of authenticity, it’s a good idea to prioritise which tasks should be kept by humans to build meaningful relationships​, and which should go to the bots to improve efficiency​. The report says that tasks such as strategising, editing and refining captions, keeping up brand standards, and interacting in the comments section should remain human while brainstorming ideas, and writing first draft suggestions are great ways to reduce staff workload. 

Create AI guidelines 

As an explosive new technology, people have widely varying relationships to AI right now. This is a challenge for charity social media teams, who know how important it is to sing from the same hymn sheet to achieve their goals. 

In addition, mindlessly embracing AI can open charities up to a host of risks which could easily be avoided. This is why all charities should create a policy for how they will use AI, how they will manage the risks, and how they will ensure their content remains consistent.