My 10 must-read Facebook resources for non-profits was a pretty popular post but as it's now a year old I've decided to search 10 fresh new links, well people do love a good list...

Five Nonprofits That Have Found Their Facebook Voice

If you are struggling with finding your Facebook voice, Like the five nonprofits listed above by Non-profit Tech 2.0 and learn from their example.

Five simple actions for hitting the ground running with Facebook Page

Facebook pages can be seen as a bit of minefield when you're new to them. However, there are very simple things you can do to make it much easier for your charity or organisation when setting up a presence. Read @Keanearrow's post to find out more.

What the Research Says About Increasing Facebook Engagement

Beth Kanter on the ball as usual. Great post based upon actual research findings.

Does a Facebook focus do us any favours?

Do we focus too much on Facebook? Tim Davies explores our obsession with the big blue social network.

Measuring the inside leg

Rob Dyson of Whizz-Kidz shares his thoughts on social media metrics.

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing

Not strictly speaking a non-profit specific post but this is a useful collection of juicy links from Copyblogger which any charity thinking about their Facebook presence will find useful.

How to import email contacts into your nonprofit Facebook Page

The Facebook Non-profit Guy shares a top tip on making the most of your contact list.

Non-Profits on Facebook

This official page is a resource for non-profits and other organizations interested in social good. Some great case studies and best practice in there.

Using Facebook to fundraise

One for the fundraisers, this is a great post from JustGiving.

Be Good Be Social videos

Interesting #BeGoodBeSocial presentations and workshops from Rob McAllen, Marc Bowker, Sara Thomas and Rob Dyson exploring social media for social good. Topics include grassroots campaigns using Facebook, developing a social media fundraising strategy, using social media to engage staff and communicating in a Big Society.

Got any Facebook non-profit resources you'd like to share? Leave a comment or tweet me @thirdsectorlab

Hat tip to @NPquarterly for sharing this PDF grabbed from 'Using Online Tools to Engage – and be Engaged by – The Public' by Matt Leighninger, Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. The full report is available on the IBM Center for Business of Government site. Although written with government in mind the lessons on engaging the public using online tools are equally as applicable to the charity world.

Click here to download:

10-tactics-bigger.pdf (2.11 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

10-tactics-bigger.pdf (2.11 MB)

Unless your social media presence is an unashamed RSS feed of your 'news' (something pretty much only the BBC, weather forecasters and sports results types get away with) it's pretty obvious that you should be using a human voice when connecting with people on Twitter, Facebook, your blog and beyond. You wouldn't turn up at a conference and suddenly become Corp-bot 4000, you would have conversations with people, you would chat about what you do, what your company/charity does and you might even chat about the fact that you build scale replicas of the Ark Royal out of matchsticks in your spare time. Despite this, the norms of face-to-face communication seem to have been thrown out the window when you look at the one-way traffic coming out of lots of organisations' social media accounts.

While many of us have ranted about this for a while now, Hyojung Park of the University of Missouri has taken a more thorough approach and completed a research study which shows that people respond more positively to a personal human voice than impersonal communication. As outlined by ScienceBlog, University of Missouri researchers presented participants with mock social media channels of large, pre-existing for-profit and non-profit organisations, complete with user comments and direct responses from the organizations’ public relations representatives. Some of the mock social media channels included the name and picture of the organisation representative with their messages, while other social media sites only included an organisational presence on their sites with no names or pictures. The researchers observed that the participants perceived social media channels utilising conversational human voice much more positively than the websites with only an organisational presence online. The researchers also found that for-profit organisations were more likely to be perceived as using a conversational human voice than were the non-profit organizations. 

Park's study starkly shows that trusting a member of staff, or indeed a volunteer, to both respresent your organisation and be themselves helps promotes trust, satisfaction and commitment in the relationships your organisation builds with its customers or users. This doesn't mean you should dive in to social media with a happy, clappy, faux-personable tone that makes you sound like you've been cloned in the Innocent Smoothies marketing department. Be professional but, ultimately, be yourself.