In recent years, social media has become a valuable tool used to assist nonprofit organizations in raising awareness of their cause and programs. The Meso Foundation has been taking advantage of a number of platforms for this purpose, and is currently present on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We use these social networks to connect with our community, provide news and information, promote upcoming events, fundraise, and simply to discuss mesothelioma and raise awareness of this cancer. We have found that Facebook, in particular, is an ideal social media tool for our purposes, and we have been using it extensively.
However, as a business, Facebook is focused on making money. Recently, in an effort to do just that, Facebook engineers have made changes to the way posts are displayed on your news feed. Just a few months ago, those of you following our Facebook page would see our posts regularly. Now, however, Facebook shows our posts to only about 10% of you. The goal for Facebook is to increase the amount of money they make from organizations using paid advertisements. As a nonprofit organization, we don’t have the luxury of spending much money to promote information that should be accessible to you for free, and for this reason, we need your help!
In order to give our posts more visibility, Facebook wants to see first that our content is interesting. This is gauged by the number of likes, comments, and shares a post receives. So here’s how you can help out:
- Interact with us! If you see a post that interests you, click “like” and leave us a comment.
- If you think your own network of friends will like the post, share it.
Not only will this allow us to hear your thoughts and opinions, but it will give our content more play by telling Facebook that our posts should be released to more of our followers. The more you interact with our posts, the more people will see them.
To break it down, here’s an example: The Meso Foundation posts an article from our blog on Facebook, and it is seen by about 200 people. If each of those 200 people like, share, or comment on the post, it will be seen by the friends of each person! This gives our content a much larger reach, and in turn, gets the word out about mesothelioma.
Through social media, we are given the opportunity to directly connect with our community members. We want to hear your questions, comments, concerns, and thoughts on the content we post. Even if you have nothing to say, a simple like or share will go a long way in getting our content out there to more people. Through these efforts, we hope to raise mesothelioma awareness while building an online community dedicated to the mission of developing effective treatment and a cure for mesothelioma patients.
If you haven’t already, be sure to like the Meso Foundation on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
