Social media

Information sharing tools

To help promote your online presence and maintain ongoing engagement with your customers, supporters and donors, you may want to incorporate tools in your website that encourage and invite people to stay up-to-date with new information you publish. These allow you to remind your clients about your organisation and invite renewed engagement from them.

There are two main types of information sharing tool. News feeds (most commonly using RSS or really simple syndication) facilitate the automatic notification of new content to your site. Social media sharing tags make it easy for people to share your website information with friends and family on social media sites. This can help you build up your social media presence.

News feeds (RSS)

This is the image for an RSS feed
that will appear on your site
when you incorporate it.

For those parts of your online presence that are regularly updated, such as your media centre, events page or blog, tools exist to allow people to sign up for automatic notifications of new content posted to these sections.

The more traditional method of doing this is to ask people to enter their email address and contact details into an online form to receive news alerts. These details can be added to your customer database for mass mailings of new items. Remember, whenever you deal with personal information, to consider your privacy obligations.

In addition to, or instead of, collecting people’s email addresses, you can incorporate tools into your site that automatically notify people about updates from your organisation, whenever new content is published online. This saves you the time of having to separately email them. These automatic notification tools are referred to as news feeds, the most common of which is RSS, that allows you to adopt a ‘publish and subscribe’ model.

Logos of some examples of popular news or RSS readers.

RSS is a format for delivering updates about regularly changing web content. RSS is often used synonymously with the term ‘web feed’.

To view your RSS feed, your customers, supporters and donors will need to set up a feed reader (aggregator). There are many popular readers, including:

• Google Reader
• NetNewsWire (Mac)
• Feeddemon (PC)

RSS readers are also increasingly being included in other internet-related software (such as the web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox) and email clients (such as Outlook or Thunderbird). You can set up a feed reader and subscribe to other people’s RSS feeds to get a feel for how it works.

If you are considering setting up an RSS feed, you may want to discuss this with your web developer to ensure that it is incorporated correctly and effectively.

Social media sharing buttons

An example of a social media sharing button

Social media sharing tags enable visitors to your site to easily let other people know about your site and its content via their social media platform of choice.

Word-of-mouth is a powerful promotional tool, particularly when it comes from friends and family. By including buttons on your site that make it easy for people to post information about your site content to their social media networks, you are inviting people to promote your organisation by word of mouth. These buttons remove several of the steps involved in a site’s visitor manually copying your site’s link, opening their social media profile page and then posting it to their profile. By removing these manual steps and reminding people that they can share your information, you increase the changes of them doing it.