"How can our nonprofit move the active conversation from our Facebook fan Page to our organization’s own blog‌?" The nonprofit that asked this question might be small, but their challenge — how to make a nonprofit’s blog more attractive to social network users — certainly isn’t a small one!  This three-part series suggests one way to tackle it.

In How to Bring Facebook Fans to Your Nonprofit Blog - Part 1, we began by looking at WHY you’d want to center the activity on your nonprofit’s blog. (This question is key to your social media strategy. If you're still thinking that over, do read Jay Baer’s Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub‌, and the comment by Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross, in particular, on Is Your Blog the Hub of Social Media Marketing at Debbie Weil's blog. Food for thought.)

Then, we talked a bit about HOW to bring Facebook fans over to your blog, leaving off with a quick introduction to the single most powerful approach to changing how (or where) people interact with your organization.

And we’ll pick up at that point today:

Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage

Teachers, dog trainers, and anyone who’s stayed awake in Psychology 101 class will spot the principles of operant conditioning here. And in this case, the behavior we’re looking for is participation on your nonprofit’s blog by your Facebook fans — or, let’s be frank, active participation by any kind of blog visitors!

There are three ways to get a behavior to happen:

1. Force it: for example, by making your blog the only place where fans can interact with your nonprofit — not recommended!
2. Lure or Bribe; and
3. Capture it.

Capturing, in this case, would be making it easy for people to visit and interact on your blog, then generously rewarding them when they choose to do so. It is easily the most effective method — but capturing may take a fair amount of time, and that can be a real problem when you’ve got board members breathing down your neck and looking for results. Exercising patience is hard work, and even more so when you can’t guarantee success on deadline.

Luring is faster. Offer something valuable for free — whether that’s one-of-a-kind content or a chance to win a prize — and more people are likely to be drawn in to get it. The down side is that, once you start luring, you may find you need to continue offering the goodies to keep your fans coming back. If you can aim for a balance between these two approaches, that may well serve you best.

Reward‌? What reward‌?

Once you’ve got people coming to your blog — and maybe they’re starting to leave a few comments, bookmark a page or two, read about your mission, tweet a few links? — that fan behavior needs to be rewarded if you want it to continue and grow. Think about your own life and you’ll notice that those actions that bring a reward (pleasure, peace of mind, a pay raise‌) are more likely to be repeated. You know all this from your fundraising and donor management activities, too.

Bear in mind — this is key — a reward is only a reward if it has value to the person who’s getting it. That’s why it helps to understand why your nonprofit’s fans (and prospective fans) are going online in the first place. When you know what they’re looking for, logically, you’ve got much better odds of delivering it!

So what are they looking for, these Facebook fans of yours?

A recent Ruder Finn study of online intentions reported that the bulk of people go online looking for education and entertainment:

• Most people go online both to learn (88%) and have fun (83%);

• More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%);

• 72% of people go online just to become part of a community.

Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries, attributes the rise of social media and blogging to loneliness and a sense of isolation — the need to connect with other individuals — along with an urge for celebrity and, well, attention:

Nobody knows us and we don’t know anybody so we need to send outward signals about who we are that can be instantly understood, signals that are able to indicate both our specialness and our potential openness to alliances with similarly special people. These signals become more and more important. We live in an atomized society of single dwellings, lonely car commutes to work, and tenuous social connections we have to work harder and harder to maintain.

Does that ring true to you?

In November 2009, a Sysomos study of nearly 600,000 Facebook Pages found that content on FB falls into two broad categories (owner-generated and user-generated), and that the volume of simple wall posts by the Page owner does not relate to the popularity of a Page. The most popular blogs show the greatest amount of other kinds of owner-generated content — photos, videos, links, favorites pages, and so one — and of content generated by the fans themselves.

So there are a couple strong hints about what you could be doing to make your Facebook Page more engaging — and by extension, to make your organization’s blog more engaging, too!

How Facebook Rewards Your FB Page Fans‌

When members of Facebook become fans of your Page or interact with it in some way, by “liking” your content or posting their own, they automatically get a reward. Depending on the privacy settings each individual has chosen, it could be a note in their own Facebook feed or profile page, or content posted to other social networks. It could simply be a response from you or another Page fan… The point is, every action taken by your fans has the potential to bring them attention and connection. A very powerful reward, indeed!

In a extremely active Facebook community, the rewarding responses often happen in real time. Instant gratification cranks up the value and encourages the rewarded fan to participate even more frequently. The more people who are active and are seen to be active on your Page (this applies to blogs, too — remember “social proof”?‌), the more other people are likely to jump in and do the same. Fan activity grows exponentially.

Facebookers enjoy the sense of being part of an active community where something new is presenting itself for their attention almost constantly. Beyond just entertainment, the flow of fresh content feeds the need to know. It's one part driven by self-education and one part by that sense of being “in the loop” that most of us find irresistable.

Watch and Listen

Look at what content on your Facebook Page gets the most response from fans. Look at what your own Facebook friends are doing when they go online. What can you deduce about their motivations for using Facebook from the content they “like” and comment on and share?‌

And that’s a good start, but as web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik points out, the best way to get qualitative data — information about what your audience wants and needs — is simply to ask:

• Set up a  Facebook Poll (yes, there’s an app for that) on your Page or Profile to get quick feedback from your fans.

• Use one of the many  free tools for polls and surveys  to ask your readers what content they like best and what brings them back – Impressity.com, for example, is a new and very professional-looking (free) survey tool that you can embed right in your blog or website.

• Got a membership event coming up? When you're chatting with members and guests over coffee, bring the talk round to their surfing habits. If Hal Niedzviecki's right, they'll be only too happy to share.
  

• Put your questions to the people on your mailing list, too.

Yes, your email contacts are relevant to your blog and social media strategy! By opting in for your newsletter, by making a donation, or by whatever (legit) method they’ve been added to your nonprofit’s database, your existing contacts have shown an active interest in engaging with your organization. No question but that they’ll have some insights to offer you about what, exactly, motivates them to welcome your messages and support its mission.

The more you learn more about what brings your target audience online and how they’re using social networks, the better you’ll be able to figure out how your organization’s blog can begin to compete for attention. 

Part Three of this series has less Psych 101 in it, but more free tools and resouces to help your blog win over those Facebook fans.  (If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here.)

As always, feel free to weigh in on anything you read here, or to share what’s working (or not) for your nonprofit – I welcome your comments!