Setting Default Social Media Settings

For virtually any page on your site—from single pages to blog posts to events—NationBuilder allows you to specify the default Tweet and Facebook share text (along with the Facebook share image) that gets used if someone wants to share the page, giving you much greater control over how your message and content gets spread over the social web.

Successful campaigns are the ones who take these opportunities to compel users to action and make specific calls-to-action unique to both the content and platform.

Setting the social media defaults for a page is more or less the same process for any type of page (from petition pages to basic pages to donation pages):

Go to the [specific page] → Settings → Social media. Here’ll you can add text for both the default Tweet (under the “Default post”) box and the excerpt used for Facebook shares.

Improving Social Media Engagement

A number of social media companies have released information on what kinds of things increases engagement among people using their platform. The key components include:

• Including hashtags in your default tweets
• Including a photo with your tweet
• Sharing links on Facebook with story previews

NationBuilder allows you to both post to Facebook and Twitter directly from your nation, providing you've connected those social media accounts to your broadcaster. However, with the exception of adding hashtags, posting to your social media from your nation will not enable story or photo previews.

For this reason, it's often recommended that you post directly from the social media accounts themselves. Adding photos to your tweets and ensuring that your linked stories on Facebook show up with a preview will all help to significantly improve the rates in which people engage with your accounts.

Social Media Cross-posting

While social media represents an excellent way to engage with your supporters, as NationBuilder explains, you don't own these relationships. In addition, for things like Facebook posts, most of your fans won't even see them: Facebook recently implemented a feature that allows organizations to promote posts to show up in the timeline's of a higher proportion of your fans, but it costs money.

Your NationBuilder home offers far more opportunities for engagement than your social media accounts, so you should leverage your social media presence to drive people back to the website whenever possible. The primary way of doing this is call cross-posting, and the idea is that you should use social media to drive people to your site, and not the opposite.

When you want to share something with your supporters, you should:

• First post it on your website
• Copy the link to the post/page on your site
• Go to your social media account and post the link, with a bit of extra information

Those that are interested will be driven to the site, where not only will they be presented with far more opportunities for meaningful engagement, but that you'll also 'own' these interactions.