So, You've Got a Lot of Facebook Friends. Now What?

Dr. Joseph Mercola at Mercola.com is a master of email marketing. I’d highly recommend signing up for his email list just to see how he makes compelling copy. You don’t have to agree with him about anything. Just read his subject lines and his headlines.

Another way to learn how to write a compelling sentence for your social-media updates is to read “Ca$hvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman, who has some good words that help get people to click through.

And finally, practice makes perfect! Sending out social-media updates every week will help you get better in no time.

Here are 16 types of headlines you can create:

• Story
• News
• Reasons why
• Item — hype
• Finality
• List
• Curiosity
• Expert positioning
• Extreme value proposition
• Testimonial
• Warning
• Dominant emotion
• If …then
• Straight benefit
• Offer
• Question

What should you make updates about?

• Your donors and volunteers: Your donors and volunteers want to feel noticed and appreciated. You can meet with them, take pictures with them, post about your open house and what they said, or even interview them for your newsletter and put excerpts in your social media.
• Your activities: If you’re giving a presentation or doing an event, definitely talk about that.
• Useful free advice: If you’ve written a blog post or two since you sent out the last e-newsletter, link that content.
• Help other people: If you’re doing a link roundup of interesting articles in your cause area, make sure to put that in, as well. Tell people you linked to them, and they might feel grateful enough to link back and promote you too. Every little bit helps!
• Joking around: I like to add a little bit of fun into my social-media posts, everything from, “Here’s what we did over the weekend” to, “Here’s a contest to win a book!” Those contests tend to be very popular.

If you’re really not sure what to write about, look at some of the keywords that lead people to your website or what people are copy-pasting from your site because they find it useful. Use Tynt.com to figure this out. (I’ve written more about this here).