Here are 5 tips tips from Heather Mansfield, author of the new book, Social Media for Social Good on how you can get better traction with your YouTube channel.

1. Use Your Nonprofit’s Avatar as Your Profile Picture
Your nonprofit’s avatar is very important for branding on YouTube. Your avatar will be displayed on all the channels you subscribe to and become friends with, as well as on the walls of any comments you post. It should be square and include your logo, and it should be the same avatar that you use on your other communities. YouTube is a visual community where avatars trump text or titles, so to maximize brand recognition, never use a photo as your profile picture.

2. Use the Colors of Your Avatar to Design Your Channel
YouTube offers one-click automatic branding for your channel. As with Twitter, you should log in, go to “My Channel > Themes and Colors > Show Advanced Options,” and enter the numeric values of the colors of your avatar. Again, these numbers can be provided to you by your graphic designer or guesstimated by using the 4096 Color Wheel.

3. Limit the Description of Your Channel to Your Mission Statement or One Paragraph
People are not on YouTube to read. They are there to watch videos and be entertained and inspired. Don’t overwhelm your viewers with unnecessary text. Simply go to “My Channel > Profile > Edit” and enter a brief “Channel Description” and link to your website. Disable most categories that you see there, such as age, movies, schools, and music. Keep your profile section simple.

4. Maximize Your YouTube Search Engine Optimization Using Channel Tags and Video Titles
YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine in the world, behind only Google. To maximize the possibility that your videos turn up in YouTube search results, first go to “My Channel >Settings > Channel Tags” and enter a wide variety of tags that you think potential supporters of your work will search for in YouTube. Obvious tags are nonprofit, organization, your city, your state, and your program areas (environment, homelessness, international development, and so on). Next, when you are uploading videos to your channel, again add as many tags as possible to each video, give a strong but brief description, and, most important, title the video to optimize your YouTube search engine optimization (SEO). Titles have the strongest impact on YouTube search results after your channel’s name, so be clever and creative when titling your videos. For example, an excellent video by the Community Housing Partnership with the title “Inside Looking Out” would probably get much more traffic if it were renamed “Inside Looking Out: Homelessness in San Francisco, California.”

5. Enable Channel and Video Comments
YouTube is much more than simply a place to host your nonprofit’s videos. It’s a thriving online community. If you don’t allow comments on your channel or your videos, then you have cut yourself off from the YouTube community. Unless your nonprofit works on controversial issues like religion, politics, immigration, or abortion and you don’t want to have to monitor your comments on a daily basis, enable channel and video comments. The vast majority of the time, the comments will be positive and supportive. For the few that aren’t, if they are exceptionally mean-spirited, then simply delete them, block the user, and move on. That said, there are seemingly more mean and grumpy people on YouTube than on any other community. Try not to be too shocked when you experience your first.

For better or worse, Facebook continues to “evolve.” In the last few weeks alone they have introduced three new features: improved Photos, the Ticker, and Top News. Copyblogger has offered up three easy ways that folks can take advantage of these latest Facebook features:

1. Upload those big, beautiful photos

The new photos are much larger.

When you upload an album you can create a mini-story that is eye-catching and provocative. Post more pictures on your Facebook Page and think about what story you can tell with the photos.

The other great thing about the new photo size is that they take up more space in the News Feed. You are claiming more real estate than a typical post. Remember to add comments onto the main picture in the Album so you can also get your message across, along with your great images.

2. Keep track of The Ticker

The Ticker has probably been the most controversial of the changes Facebook introduced. Some people like it, others can’t stand it, and some have hidden it.

The way to get the most out of the Ticker is to encourage interaction. When you are getting more interaction throughout the day on your posts, other people can easily click on their friend’s Ticker update to see what their friend is commenting on or Liking

Your post can have a longer life if there is a continuing conversation. Any time someone comments, their friends have the potential to see the post and the thread of comments, then jump in and add to the conversation.

Post often (once or twice a day if possible) so you can pop into that Ticker more often.

Make sure you are sharing great, relevant content and ask questions related to that content in the update, just as AllFacebook.com did in the Ticker shown here.

3. Stay on top of the Top Stories

Top Stories aren’t actually completely new.

We used to have Top News and Most Recent on separate tabs. But now they are blended into one stream. Top Stories are what Facebook thinks you want to see, based on past interactions.

If you want to be a Top Story, make sure you are getting those comments and Likes.

So how do you get more comments and Likes?

 

The Electronic Frontier foundation has put together a list of tips on how the #Occupy movement can protect its mobile data. As they say: “Protesters of all political persuasions are increasingly documenting their protests — and encounters with the police — using electronic devices like cameras and cell phones. The following tips apply to protesters in the United States who are concerned about protecting their electronic devices when questioned, detained, or arrested by police. These are general guidelines; individuals with specific concerns should talk to an attorney.”

Want to see the cutting edge of crowd-sourced video production? The Uptake, hands-down the best guerrilla video shop in the country (they live-streamed the Wisconsin Uprising), has developed a new video aggregator for the Occupy Wall Street movement that lets you easily click back and forth between feeds from 61 different locations (and counting, there’s even an #OccupyLjubljana feed from Slovenia).

Here’s a screenshot of Uptake’s aggregator.

 

Pretty amazing…

According to the blog Frogloop, “It was recently reported that one in three Americans owns a smartphone.  Some sources are indicating that more people will own smartphones than traditional cellphones by 2012. Add tablets into the mix and its clear that people are quickly adopting mobile computing.”

And as smartphone and tablet use rises, your email follows. Email reading on mobile devices rose 81% from October, 2010, to April, 2011. It stands to continue rising. Today, 16% of email is read on mobile devices while desktops get 36% of messages and webmail 48%.

Here are some of Frogloops tips on how to craft your emails to make them compatible with smart phones:

• Clear, short and actionable subject lines followed by quick easy to read text with a link (to whatever your action or conversion might be) early on. This is a good argument for minimalistic header images in email. As you know, more and more desktop and webmail email clients default to hiding images from readers. In mobile, images are vigorously suppressed.
• Remember that messages received on iPhones with lots of images can become awkward when email is viewed on a small mobile device.
• Include a mobile stylesheet. This is something that can be worked into most email templates but is still not often seen. Check with your provider for assistance or just try it out yourself but if you have any sort of CSS in a template or “wrapper” now then chances are you can add a mobile stylesheet.
• Call to action up front and very clear. People need to see it/read it/have chance to click it without scrolling up/down or left/right. Don’t rely on image-based links as images may not appear on mobile messages. Try to work a call to action text link into the first few lines of your message.
• Make sure you have a “view this message on the web” link clearly visible in the preheader (the area at the top just above the message). You may not be able to fully optimize your message for mobile but the web browser version may be easier for mobile users to read and navigate because images and style sheets are better supported.
• Take Google design principles to heart: speed and simplicity matter even more on mobile.

M+R has a great checklist for preparing to live tweet an event. As they remind us “Live-tweeting can be a great way to build your audience on Twitter – if you do it right…Setting yourself up for successful live-tweeting before the event is just as important as doing a good job with the tweets themselves. Thinking through a few simple things in advance will not only ensure that you can logistically do your tweeting from the event, but it can also massively increase the number of people who see your tweets.” Here’s the checklist to get you started:

1. Follow the people you think will be interested in the content you will be posting and the people you know are going to the event. They may follow you back, helping you build an audience!
2. Check the event location for Wi-Fi and/or mobile phone service. Some events held at hotel or conference venues have spotty reception or Wi-Fi. If you need a password to access the internet, make sure to find it out in advance!
3. Find out the designated hashtag for the event and promote it to your followers before the event begins. This allows people to search for tweets related to the event — regardless of who posts them.
4. If there is no designated hashtag, search Twitter to see what hashtag(s) other attendees are using and follow suit.
5. If there is no hashtag already in use, choose a short but memorable combination of letters and numbers and start the trend yourself. For example, M+R’s annual Benchmarks event was live-tweeted under the hashtag #2011Bench. Before settling on a hashtag, do a quick search to make sure the hashtag isn’t already in use!
6. Find out the Twitter handles of speakers/presenters at the event ahead of time so you can mention them in your tweets if you quote them. Those people may re-tweet your tweet to their followers, which could help build your audience!
7. Decide whether you’ll be tweeting from a phone or a computer. If you’re tweeting from a non-smart phone, you’ll need to add your phone to your Twitter account ahead of time. Log in to Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/devices and follow the instructions on the screen.
8. If you’re tweeting from an iPhone or another smartphone, download the Hootsuite or Twitter application.
9. Bring a charger for your phone or laptop – tweeting can wear out your battery and it’s best to be prepared.
10. Decide how you will archive all of the tweets from the event. Sign up for a free service such as twapperkeeper.com.

Facebook ads have proven to be a powerful tool to quickly and cheaply rack up a few thousand supporters. Looks like the “cheap” part is fading into history.  According to Epolitics: Facebook’s cost-per-click jumped 22% in the second quarter of 2011, after a 40% rise in the previous quarter — and they expect ad rates to continue to rise for the rest of the year.

At the same time, Google’s cost-per-click rose 12% over the past year, helping the company to a $9 billion in second-quarter revenue.

The question is whether rising ad prices will soon price grassroots groups out of the market — and, as a result, undermine one of our most effective online organizing tools.

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has uncovered some pretty interesting trends in their latest Internet survey. The goal of the survey was explore  the social impact of widespread use of social networking. Specifically: “Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way?” Here are some summary conclusions from the report:

Facebook users are more trusting than others.

We asked people if they felt “that most people can be trusted.” We found that the typical internet user is more than twice as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted. Further, we found that Facebook users are even more likely to be trusting. We found that a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users and more than three times as likely as non-internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.

Facebook users have more close relationships.

The average American has just over two discussion confidants (2.16) – that is, people with whom they discuss important matters. This is a modest, but significantly larger number than the average of 1.93 core ties reported when we asked this same question in 2008. Controlling for other factors we found that someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users.

Facebook users get more social support than other people.

We looked at how much total support, emotional support, companionship, and instrumental aid adults receive. On a scale of 100, the average American scored 75/100 on a scale of total support, 75/100 on emotional support (such as receiving advice), 76/100 in companionship (such as having people to spend time with), and 75/100 in instrumental aid (such as having someone to help if they are sick in bed).

Internet users in general score 3 points higher in total support, 6 points higher in companionship, and 4 points higher in instrumental support. A Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day tends to score an additional 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support, and 5 points higher in companionship, than internet users of similar demographic characteristics. For Facebook users, the additional boost is equivalent to about half the total support that the average American receives as a result of being married or cohabitating with a partner.

Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people.

Our survey was conducted over the November 2010 elections. At that time, 10% of Americans reported that they had attended a political rally, 23% reported that they had tried to convince someone to vote for a specific candidate, and 66% reported that they had or intended to vote. Internet users in general were over twice as likely to attend a political meeting, 78% more likely to try and influence someone’s vote, and 53% more likely to have voted or intended to vote.  Compared with other internet users, and users of other SNS platforms, a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day was an additional two and half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone on their vote, and an additional 43% more likely to have said they would vote.

Twitter Hashtags got you stumped? M+R blog has come to the rescue. They’ve put together a quick list of tips of how to strategically use hashtags to expand your organization’s reach.

For those of you that are wondering what on earth a hashtag is: For those less familiar with the Twitterverse, hashtags are akin to keywords. Created as a way to group information on Twitter, hashtags allow you to categorize the 40,000+ Tweets that happen every minute.

To create a hashtag, just place the hash symbol (#) before any word or phase. The hashtag can go anywhere in your Tweet.

By strategically incorporating trending hashtags into your Tweets, your organization can begin to increase its reach on Twitter. Here’s how:

1. Find out what’s trending by visiting search.twitter.com or whatthetrend.com, a website dedicated to tracking and defining trends.
2. Take advantage of existing trends by incorporating a trending hashtag into your Tweet!

For example: During the last week of 2010, #2010was and #iprefer were both trending topics for several days. Either hashtag could have been easily worked into any organization’s Tweets:

#iprefer a world where everyone is equal. Tell your senator to support XYZ policy: YOUR LINK

#2010Was the year that @YourOrg supporters sent 700K letters in support of #equality: YOUR LINK

Users monitor the hashtags they care about. If a hashtag is trending, that means it is one of the most popular hashtags currently being used on Twitter. In other words, thousands of people are actively using (and likely monitoring) that particular hashtag! By Tweeting with that hashtag, you’ve broken out of your organization’s direct circle of followers and inserted yourself into a new, wider audience.

When someone monitoring the trending hashtag sees your organization’s Tweet and retweets it to one of their own followers, your organization’s circle expands to include their followers as well.

Facebook Pages, as opposed to Profiles or Groups, have evolved into a powerful platform for groups to keep in touch and engage with their online supporters. Here’s a list of tips from social media maven Beth’s Blog:

1. Keep your page name short and accurate, you can’t change it after you create it
2. There is a day or two lag for it to show up in search
3. Content is lifeblood of your page
4. Start with information tab: be complete, accurate, and honest
5. The Fan Page backend is like a cms and if you know a little HTML you can do some spiffy stuff
6. Not all applications are optimized for pages, visit the app page to check
7. All pages require an ADMIN (person with a designated FB profile) for security reasons because they want a real person
8. Admin are not public – always have multiple admins (add multiple admins via email or FB) as a precaution so you don’t lose access to the page.  Standard best practice
9. Wall Tab – accuracy updates of information.  “Write Something” lets you post rich content
10. More interactive content is better – the Wall is a history of interactivity
11. Worst thing you can do with a page is dump an RSS feed into the Page – it won’t be as successful
12. When you make updates to the Page, it appears in the streams of your fans or people who have joined your page.  This is very powerful viral marketing
13. When you start to write in the “write something” you get options to add links, photos, videos – post things that are beyond promotion content. Be interactive, make it interesting, provide behind the scenes content.  Incorporate events into your page.  “Exclusive content is good”
    Shed the tradition PR schtick content and make it real.
14. Lexicon on Facebook lets you track words and phrases