Shantel Khleif shares how she built a social media base with over 20,000 followers. In this episode, she outlines which platform is best for your nonprofit, ways to engage your followers, and whether you should be paying to boost posts and pages. Shantel possesses extensive knowledge of social media. She is the co-founder of Imagine Media, and her company has been profiled in Entrepreneur Magazine, Georgia Public Broadcasting, Atlanta Magazine, and a ton of blogs and podcasts.

*****Timestamped Highlights*****

(3:37) How she built a base of over 20,000 followers on social media
(5:35) The ideal number of weekly posts to make on each social media platform
(7:09) The user demographics of various social network platforms
(9:41) Should your marketing strategy include paid boosting?
(10:42) Being concerned about quality, not quantity, of your followers

(11:32) The social media platforms most appropriate for your nonprofit
(16:10) Specific ways to use social media in your fundraising and marketing efforts
(18:30) The importance of video content to tell your story
(22:00) the danger in not responding to your social media followers
(23:24) Using social media to increase transparency
(27:40) How to know the best time to post for your audience

Links:

Imagine Media Consulting: www.imaginemediaconsulting.com
Imagine More Podcast: www.imageinemorepodcast.com
New Story Charity: https://newstorycharity.org/

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Read the Transcript for Episode 55 Below or Click Here!

Dolph Goldenburg: Welcome to the Successful Nonprofits™ Podcast. I’m your host Dolph Goldenburg with an episode to help you sharpen and get more out of your social media efforts. How many of us have sat in a board or staff meeting when someone says, “We need a presence on social media”? Now, sometimes, they’re talking about your parents, social media like LinkedIn and other times they’re talking about your kid social media like Instagram or snapchat. Now, full disclosure, before I get hate mail from LinkedIn users, I love my nearly 1500 connections on LinkedIn, and honestly, it’s probably my favorite out of all of the social media, but while I’m only an old middle-aged guy. I have an old soul, but do you know what’s worse than just someone in a meeting saying, “Hey, we should be on social media”?

It’s when someone pulls up your Facebook page and sees that you only have 198 followers or pulls up your Twitter page. I don’t know if they call them Twitter pages and sees they only half, 73 followers and yes, I’m not making this up. Those are my actual number of followers on the day that I recorded this on both Facebook and on Twitter. None of us are perfect at social media. I certainly am not, and most of us are still able to pick lots of low hanging fruit and the social media orchards, and this is true whether you’re a nonprofit or for-profit or just a collaborative group of people not formally recognized by the IRS as either. It is my pleasure today to welcome Shantel Khleif to the podcast. She is the co-founder of Imagine Media, which is a full-service social marketing team.

Her company has been profiled and Entrepreneur magazine, Georgia public broadcasting and Atlanta magazine and tons of blogs and podcasts. She is also the founder of the newest podcast that really you should subscribe to. It’s called Imagine More, and it is a weekly show about how the people who imagine the power of more. Oh yeah. And let me also say in her spare time, she founded a nonprofit called Operation Celebration. It might also be fair to say that she has one mighty busy person. Now, with some irony that JFK never saw the internet and never had a Facebook account. He will now help us welcome our guest. Shantel Khleif,

Hey Shantel, welcome to the podcast.

Shantel Khleif: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Well, thank you for being here. So you know, I always say this, I say this often, I stalk our guests online for a week or two before we talk. I’m able to tell our listeners that your firm has 4,400 Facebook followers, 2200 Twitter followers, 5,000 Pinterest followers and a whopping and yes, I was blown away by this, 9,500 Instagram followers. You got to tell us the story about how you achieved more than 20,000 social media followers combined among all of those platforms. Well, I

Shantel Khleif: I am excited to chat through that, and I appreciate you taking a look at our accounts. I hope you have added yourself to that list. It’s funny because I think we certainly started out, um, what does that phrase have, you know, the cobbler’s child never wears shoes. It was difficult for us at the beginning when we first started the company to really carve out the time to be intentional about our own social media efforts because we truly felt the clients came first. But over the past four years, we continue to evolve that thought process and came to the realization that, how could any person or client trust us with their social presence if we ourselves didn’t practice what we preach? So we’ve gotten to those numbers. I mean, it’s certainly taken time. We’ve been in business four and a half years. We’ve posted consistently, frequently. We’ve drafted marketing strategies for Imagine Media consulting. And I think we’ve been just really intentional about trying to engage with our audience and put content out there that our target audience is looking for and that’s authentic to our voice.

Dolph Goldenburg: So, what are some of those things that are in that marketing strategy in addition to posting frequently and trying to provide content that people would be interested in?

Shantel Khleif: Yeah, so we have carved out or determined the one frequency that we’d like to personally to those platforms. That doesn’t stray week to week. We don’t come up with busy weeks and only post once; we’re posting at least seven times per week on Instagram, for example.

Dolph Goldenburg: Holy Mary! Hold on. You’re posting seven times a week on Instagram. Okay.

Shantel Khleif: That would be the minimum that we’d probably suggest for any company to be really effective.

Dolph Goldenburg: Wow. Okay. Now, are you posting seven times a week on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest as well?

Shantel Khleif: I have to double check, but I believe it’s five on Facebook. At least three pins on Pinterest. Then on Twitter we, we overlap some of the content because it’s a platform we’re not as focused on. It’s not really where our market lives. I believe an additional seven on Twitter per week.

Dolph Goldenburg: Wow. When I was kind of looking at all of your different social media accounts, I did see that there was some cross-platform posting. I wanted to ask you about that. So I guess that’s typically kosher. Are there different users, or is there a lot of overlap among your combined more than 20,000 social media followers?

Shantel Khleif: Yeah, so that’s a great question. There is some overlap, and so you’ll see us sharing Instagram to Facebook. We don’t encourage that all the time, and we don’t encourage it unless you really change that caption to fit that profile. For example, if you are sharing your Facebook post to Twitter, you do want to make sure you change the character count, crop the picture before you just blind share because like you mentioned, the people on each platform are very different and for the type of content they’re hoping to consume, their expectation is very different. Not encourage encouraged just a blanket posting and posting the exact same thing only on each platform, but making sure you ever organic content for all of those platforms as well.

So, and again, I clearly I’m a novice, I got 73 Twitter followers and like 198 Facebook followers. So, I’ve got to ask, how are people different on each of those platforms? So how is Facebook different from Twitter versus people that are using Instagram every day and Pinterest? Yes,

Shantel Khleif: Just from like a gender/age audience standpoint – very big. So, Facebook, for example, tends to lean a little older; Twitter is probably in the 20 to 30 range, but the people that are consuming content on Twitter primarily turn to Twitter for news and updates, like very quick updates, politically like PR type of content. They’re not going to Twitter to read an inspiring or see it inspiring image that provokes them to think about something else. So, they’re wanting to consume content really quickly. And so the captions are much shorter. We typically see being used from a customer service standpoint. So if someone has a problem, Twitter’s typically the first platform they turn to. Whereas your consumer, your customer may follow you on Instagram more, but if they have a problem with your product or your service, they’re going to go to Twitter to get that immediate response. So, each platform has a different expectation to the customer, but then also the type of content should vary.

Dolph Goldenburg: Okay. And I noticed we have not yet talked about LinkedIn, which is one of my own favorites, honestly. What is the average profile for your average LinkedIn user?

Shantel Khleif: It’s certainly business professional. So, the type of also content that we’re posting on LinkedIn is not going to be anything other than business. It’s not going to be the baby showers or the bridal party. That content lives on Facebook. So, anything business focus lives on LinkedIn. But I do think that there’s a wide variety of users on LinkedIn because you know, everyone’s always looking to grow professionally, whether that’s with you know, learning and resources or switching careers. So LinkedIn across the board, all ages, but the content is again, different for that platform.

Dolph Goldenburg: So again, if we can kind of just stay with how you built kind of your social media followers and, and maybe you can also talk a little bit about, um, what you recommend to clients. But how does like advertising, for example, Facebook advertising to get followers, how does that typically fit into your marketing strategy?

Shantel Khleif: Absolutely. So, we do set aside a budget every month to create brand awareness campaigns on both Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And the first step in determining that is we created our customer personas. So, we have Marketing Mary; we have Digital Dave, and those are just kind of like get names right now, but all of those have very specific problems that they’re trying to solve by following us on social media. So, we want to make sure we’re hitting those different customer personas in the content we’re creating, but specifically to the ad spend question that you mentioned, it’s kind of like nails on a chalkboard to only think about followers because that typically isn’t the ROI or the KPI that we’re looking for to help us get to that conversion. Does that make sense?

Dolph Goldenburg: It does, but you’ve got to tell me more. So, what is the number? What are you looking at?

Shantel Khleif: Yeah, so what’s more important to us as engagement. We want to see that people are engaged and the posts there. They’re reading them. They’re liking them. They’re commenting. So that’s a big indicator of success for us. In addition to that, it’s website clicks. So, we would like to funnel people to our website to learn more. And to our discovery form to cop on a call with them or consume some of our content on our blog or help them get to a point where they’d want to sign up for a newsletter because then we can stay in front of them through a variety of other drip campaigns. So, our metric is not followers, although I do think for businesses it certainly creates a level of credibility and clout. Followers are great and you can, you know, the more followers you have, the more people that see your posts organically, but that’s really not the conversion that us as imagine media are looking for at this stage in the business.

Dolph Goldenburg: Help me understand, is it a chicken and egg thing? So, which comes first, the followers or the engagement?

Shantel Khleif: I think both. So when we’re creating strategies for our clients and partners, we have metrics that we’re doing for both. We have a brand awareness campaign that we’re running for likes and engagement. And then we have a conversions campaign, typically a budget set aside for that and different A/B testing to direct people to what that conversion looks like, whether that’s a website page or a newsletter form, the about us page, whatever that metric is for that client. We have both campaigns running at the same time. So, I think when starting your company, it is important to run the brand awareness campaigns for likes and followers and engagement to get your brand in front of more eyeballs to help increase those impressions so that people trust you and know you when they are ready to make that purchase or donate, et cetera. But I think there’s a lot of value in running both different types of campaigns and A/B testing between each to see as people are liking your page, what is actually helping them convert and get them to that next step?

Dolph Goldenburg: Out of the social media platforms that you and your clients use the most, are there platforms you find are more conducive to engagement than others? And if so, which ones?

Shantel Khleif: You know, it really depends on your target market. So, I’ll give you a couple of examples. Companies in the food and beverage space, Instagram is a really great platform for them. It’s very visual. It can show their food, can show their environment. It creates that story as we see far more engagement on Instagram for those types of clients. For professional services or more B to B partners of ours, Facebook and LinkedIn are those platforms for them.

Dolph Goldenburg: Maybe art and cultural organizations should be really focusing on Instagram and Pinterest, whereas Workforce Development Organization should be focusing on LinkedIn and Facebook?

Shantel Khleif: I don’t think so. I, I would probably nix out Pinterest for the arts segment

Dolph Goldenburg: I have, I do not have a Pinterest account. And the only reason I have an Instagram account has because my nephew tagged me one time, and I actually had to register in order to see how I was tagged. So, clearly, I’m swimming in the deep end here without a flotation device.

Shantel Khleif: I’m happy to sit down for coffee. Anytime you liked to about Instagram. It’s certainly a crowd favorite in the office, but Pinterest traditionally is more recipes, home decor, fitness, women-populated, um, inspirational. It’s kind of like, you know, Pinspiration it’s more inspirational, and it’s a placeholder. So you typically pin something that you’d like to execute later, I think in the nonprofit space. I’m trying to think of an example of that that may be more relevant. Maybe you are hosting a 5k, and you would like to do a collaboration with a clothing company that can help make a great finish shirt for your nonprofit. Maybe there’d be a collaboration on Pinterest, but if one of your KPIs is to generate additional donors, I don’t think Pinterest would be the primary platform.

Dolph Goldenburg: Okay, good to know. What about social service agencies? Are there typical platforms that you recommend for them?

Shantel Khleif: I think Facebook, uh, is a, is a good general starting point and launching pad. So that would be my answer for social services. There is essentially is the platform that people now just kind of expect you to be on. Our rule of thumb is if you’re starting your social presence, choose one or two platforms that you’re really going to invest a lot of time and energy into as opposed to trying to do five to 10 or multiple or more. Really be intentional about choosing one, testing that, seeing what people are engaging with it, see what’s working, see what’s not. And then once you get comfortable with that platform and you know, consistently telling the story on that, you can try converting to another one or try to add another to the mix. But I do think Facebook is a good launching pad.

Dolph Goldenburg: And so, what are some other ways that nonprofits use their social media? So, once they get those 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 followers, how do they use their social media?

Shantel Khleif: Yeah, so I again in that followers is a little tricky. People are going to go to your social pages to theory if you’re a credible, nonprofit. But I think the power of social media in addition to generating awareness and potential new donors is really telling your story and why you’re different than all the others and what sets you apart and the impact you’re making in the community. So, with all of these platforms, you can really tell your story and tell it authentically to explain who you are, the culture behind the scenes, the hard work that you’re putting into it. Um, to make people feel like they’re a part of the organization and contributing to something that they understand and get and see the behind the scenes and see all the tough work. It inspires and makes them feel more passionate about what you’re doing if you can tell your story. So, you know, sharing pictures of the nonprofit that I started a while back, we created backpacks for children that otherwise wouldn’t be able to gather their school supplies for each school semester.

Dolph Goldenburg: Let me jump in real quick. Folks should go to that Facebook page. There are some adorable pictures of kids with backpacks.

Shantel Khleif: Thanks. And I do have to preface, we have not posted in like two years. I did close down that nonprofit.

Dolph Goldenburg:  I looked at that, and I saw there were not as many followers, and I guess people just drop off over time.

Shantel Khleif: And that’s the other thing. So, with that consistency, you only post one. So, you only, you know, you sometimes post a couple times a week and only other times maybe not at all. People crave the consistency. And so, if you start to not post and are not as engaged in active, people will unfollow. We wanted to share the behind the scenes. We wanted to introduce the kids as much as we can. And show the pictures and the testimonials and show the volunteers packing the backpacks and all the hard work and, you know, shout out, thank you so much for donating. Thank you so much for your time. Um, and what inspired the story and that was years ago now, but I think we also, another really great leverage point that you can do on social is video content to really tell that story and to really home in on it. We, we weren’t doing it at that time, but now that you really can create a great video with your iPhone or do a live video behind the scenes. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing video, especially on these platforms. And what greater way to tell your story than sharing such an important memory in your organization.

Dolph Goldenburg: Admittedly, I do see more and more nonprofits now and also more and more for profits, doing video logs and video on social media.

Shantel Khleif: Absolutely. We, I follow a great nonprofit. A friend of mine started one New Story Charity, and I think they do a phenomenal job on social media sharing.  When they fund a home in Haiti, and they’re building a home for our family, they are doing an Instagram story behind the scenes to show the team building the house, and they do an announcement on Facebook to show the family that’s moving into that house. They’re really including their entire community online and virtually in what’s happening on the ground floor.

Dolph Goldenburg: That’s very cool, and we will make sure that we include a link to them in the show notes so folks can go and see what they’re doing. Shantel, we’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we are going to talk about the most common social media mistakes that nonprofits make.

The Successful Nonprofits™ Podcast is produced by the Goldenburg Group as part of our mission to provide board development, strategic planning, and interim leadership to help nonprofits thrive in a competitive environment.

We’re talking about social media today, but I have an old fashioned, 20^th-century offer for you and that’s the Goldenberg groups quarterly newsletter. It is just about to hit mailboxes all over the country. And I don’t mean email boxes. I mean those boxes made of metal and plastic and sometimes brick. And why do we still print a newsletter? Some say it’s because we love Benjamin Franklin, America’s most preeminent printer and the founder of the post office. And actually that’s kind of true. I do happen to Benjamin Franklin, but we also do it because we love the feel of real paper in our hands and because some of us just prefer to read useful information that is printed. Like this podcast, our newsletters are light on firm promotion and heavy on information you will use. So, if you’d like to join the list of nearly 750 hipsters, middle-aged folks and lovers of print media who subscribed our free newsletter, then drop me a line at dolph@successfulnonprofits.com, and just send me your name and your mailing address in that email, and let me thank you in advance for helping to make America great again by keeping high quality postal service jobs inside our borders.

Oh, we’re back with Shantel Khleif, cofounder of Imagine Media consulting. So Shantel, I promised that we would talk about the big mistakes that organizations make in their social media. Tell us about them.

Shantel Khleif: Certainly. So, a few things to come to mind that nonprofits in this space oftentimes make is they may start social media platform, and they may sometimes post, which is a great start, but they don’t have any, anyone monitoring those accounts. And again, while it’s great that you have an account and you’re posting and you’re generating likes and engagement, if you’re not responding to the questions that come in or the comments that people post, your customers or donors or fans will get frustrated. So, kind of one rule of thumb is make sure that someone’s monitoring that community. And that’s even going as far as if someone comments on your picture, comment back and thank them or like that comment. There’s something that happens when a brand interacts with the customer that makes that customer – what would be a good word doc to call kind of what the typical nonprofit is it donor or fan?

Dolph Goldenburg: It is a donor.

Shantel Khleif: Okay. So, I do think that there’s something that that happens when a nonprofit engages with a donor and makes them feel valued and special and notifies them that, you know, they’re making a difference by contributing. So, responding to questions, concerns and comments is something that sometimes I think accidentally falls through the cracks. Making sure that someone’s logging in every day and checking that is a huge yes, please, let’s do that right away. The other eye is transparency. In my eyes and in my opinion, people are craving transparency in their donor experience. So whether that’s like really wanting to know where their funds are going, and if there’s a way that you can talk through that and publicize that on social media, it creates a level of trust that I think social media people are craving.

So, again, I think it will be different for every organization. But again, to tie off that and just using them as kind of my example, New Story Charity, they have a hundred percent model whereas 100% of anything you donate goes directly to building that home. And they have a completely different fund to fund operations. And with that 100% model, they will send you updates on social media and via email to say, you know, “Your donation has contributed to 80% of this home; we will let you know as soon as we’re at 100% and begin building the home.” They send a video to you via Facebook or be, you know, Instagram or on email to say, this is the family you’ve helped. This is the video that, you know, we recorded of them moving in. Thank you so much. And so, I think that transparency is something that, especially in this day and age where people consume content really quickly, they want results pretty quickly. Social media acts fairly quickly so that if you can provide a level of transparency in some way, I think there’s a lot of value there.

Dolph Goldenburg: So, on transparency, would you recommend that nonprofits tweet out or post on their Facebook page or whatever, a link to their IRS form 990? Or is that too much transparency? And I asked that question cause I mean it is a public document. Anyone can go to GuideStar and get a copy of the 990. So it, I mean it, it’s a fully public document.

Shantel Khleif: Thinking of myself, if I were a donor, I don’t even know if I would know to research that. I think just, um, maybe even just recognition, right? So, it doesn’t have to be, you know, you’re $100 went to XYZ, but it’s like, thank you so much for contributing. We can’t wait to show you the impact ever after we have our big event next month. Publicly recognizing pupils or shouting them out or thanking them I think can go really far as well.

Dolph Goldenburg: Very cool.

Shantel Khleif: Yeah.

Dolph Goldenburg: Okay. So, far we’ve got make sure that you’ve got someone monitoring your page, make sure that you have full transparency and your use of social media. What are some of the other do’s and don’ts for nonprofits?

Shantel Khleif: So, I can’t harp enough on consistency and really crafting your story. So, we find oftentimes social media is just on someone’s extra to do list, and it becomes exactly that. It’s okay, they’re clocking out at five 30, or they’re leaving for the day, and they haven’t posted anything yet. So, they need to check it off pretty quickly to get out of the door. And again, it’s great that you have content on there, but if it’s an afterthought, it’s not intentional, and it’s not engaging enough. Our suggestion is to carve out time, whether that’s the beginning of the week, the week before every month, to put a content calendar in place. What type of content are your donors interested in reading? Maybe that’s an infographic to show the impact you’ve made in your community. Maybe you share another nonprofit’s blog posts that was really inspiring on the emotion behind giving back and paying it forward.

Try to carve out what type of content you want to post and then curate that content and schedule it in, so it doesn’t become an afterthought that doesn’t get posted at the right time. That’s the other thing. Timing is everything on social. So if you’re, if you’re posting something at 9:00 PM but the majority of your donors are actually on between 11 and 12 during a lunch break, you want to make sure you’re generating content that that time as opposed to, you know, the time that you have been posting in the past.

Dolph Goldenburg: How do you know when your donors are actually on?

Shantel Khleif:  So, it certainly trial and error if you don’t have a social media account already. You can study trends of when the majority of the population is on these platforms. And we have a great post on our blog as well that I’m happy to send over on the traditional and typical best times to post.

But our suggestion is to post, and then study the analytics. So, I think if, if I were to mention, so the third would be content, calendar and strategy, and the fourth would be analyze. So, going into the back end of all of these platforms and studying, what were the best posts this past month? What did people like reading the most? What drove the most clicks to the website? What was the best time? All of these sites have graphs on the best times and your demographic for each platform. So I would study those and put aside time to do that so you can be more intentional in the following months.

Dolph Goldenburg: Any other tips on do’s and don’ts for nonprofits that are either wanting to get into social media or are struggling and doing so?

Shantel Khleif: Think of social media… it’s supposed to be social. You can’t push, push, push. Like we need donations, we need donations. Create your story and tell that story. And people will naturally become raving fans and want to share that content to their friends. They will want to become brand ambassadors for you because you have crafted a story that they connect to. If constantly sell, sell, sell to get something in return, people will very quickly be turned off by your brand and your nonprofit. And so, our suggestion is to share more and just craft that story as opposed to expect more. And naturally, it comes because you’re a strong relationship with your donors.

Dolph Goldenburg: While I know you said that’s the last one in my head, as somebody who only has 198 Facebook users. So what the heck do I know? But in my head, I think that’s probably the most important.

Shantel Khleif: It’s really great that you have 198?

Dolph Goldenburg: yeah, that’s kind of you to say. Thank you!

Shantel Khleif: Let me add just one more note to that. We would re rather you have 198 engaged followers that want to hear what you’re saying as opposed to 500 that may look better on paper but maybe only 50 of them are engaged, and actually true donors to or followers or advocates for your brand. So followers again are great from a first impression standpoint, and there is some value in having an established brand on social with followers, but making sure that they’re the right followers is I think equally or if not more important than having more so quality over quantity.

Dolph Goldenburg: I love it because you said the last one was going to be, “Hey, make sure it’s social.” But really the last one is, “Make sure you’ve got the right followers.” So, we actually squeezed one more out of you

Shantel Khleif: I could talk social media all day, so we should probably pause it there.

Dolph Goldenburg: We always do an Off-the-Map question, and typically, I have a sense of what I want that it to be, and this time, you know Shantel, I did not. I walked into this interview without one, but over the course of the interview, I came up with what is hopefully the perfect Off-the-Map question for you. Although technically it’s on the map, far off on the side of the map.

So, there is a graveyard that is full of failed social media. Some are dead, and some are walking dead. I’m talking Helio, Google Plus that they’re probably walking dead. They’re not dead yet. MySpace, if it’s not dead, it should be. So, if you could walk into that graveyard and bring just one, and maybe you know of other social media that are dead, social media back to life, which one would you bring back to life and how is it different from those social media we already have?

Shantel Khleif: I don’t know if I would bring any back to life. I think what we’re learning in social media is we have to continually innovate. And so I truly think a lot of these platforms will kind of go to that graveyard at one point, and there’s going to be iterations of it that offer something different. What we’re learning about the demographic, like the millennial population specifically, is they’re not agnostic to one platform. If another platform pops out tomorrow that seems interesting, they’re going to completely migrate. So, I think maybe one thought is not to focus all your efforts on one platform because most likely it will change. Continue to iterate and change and keep a pulse on what’s going on. To answer your questions specifically, AIM was big when I was in middle school. It was just more of a, um, kind of a throwback Thursday feeling for me. Yeah. Are you familiar with instant messenger?

Dolph Goldenburg: Oh, I feel so old. No, I’m not.

Shantel Khleif: It was the little yellow guy, and you had to wait for the dial-up phone call. It was honestly just a chat and a chat messenger.

Dolph Goldenburg: Oh yeah. Through hotmail.

Shantel Khleif: Yeah.

Dolph Goldenburg: Yeah, yeah. Now I remember. Yeah. Yeah.

Shantel Khleif: Maybe I’d bring that back with just to see some of our silly away messages we made and just to read some little conversations cause they’re probably hilarious looking back, but not because they think it adds more value than anything else out there right now.

Dolph Goldenburg: So, you bring it back for a day, and then you’d walk it back into the graveyard and say, there’s a reason you’re all dead. Stay that way. Yeah,

Shantel Khleif: I think we learned something from each of those though. I mean we’ve learned something from my space, and I think Twitter may be there at some point soon. We were learning something either about our customer or donor or just ourselves as a person and the type of content we want. So, I think there’s value in all of them, but they probably all have a life.

Dolph Goldenburg: Yeah. I do have to share with you, back when I was an executive director, I was talking with a very, very young marketing person who is in our organization, and she was raving about Facebook, and you know, I agreed with her that Facebook was important. I said, but you know, one day Facebook is just not going to be important at all. And she’s like, no, no way. And I said to her, you know, I remember a time when AOL was the giant, and if you were not on AOL in some way and one of their chat rooms or whatever, as an organization, you are a nobody. And she could not believe that once upon a time AOL was a giant. It’s like really Google it, and one day Facebook will be dead too.

Shantel Khleif: Yeah. We had a really interesting panel discussion last week on the psychology of marketing. We had experts come in on psychology and also marketing and how that plays a part. And I agree. I think that again, people aren’t sold on a specific platform. It’s really just the purpose that platform serves. So Facebook, if you’re able to connect with their family and see pictures and share stories, you know, that’s the purpose that right now Facebook is serving. And you know, Instagram, if you’re able to look at beautiful content and pictures and be inspired, but if that, you know of another or some piece of software creates that people may migrate over for change.

Dolph Goldenburg: Shantel, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. I have followed you on the social media that I use, which is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I’ve also subscribed to your podcast Imagine More. And I would strongly, let me repeat this, strongly encourage our listeners to do the same as well as to visit you at www.imaginemediaconsulting.com and at each of those sites, our listeners can find links to your social media. We will make sure that we include those sites in our show notes. But again, thank you so much for coming on. I learned a lot, and I hope our listeners did too.

Shantel Khleif: Thank you so much for having me.

Dolph Goldenburg: Grateful thanks to Shantel for sharing her expertise about social media. Of course, you can always visit our show notes at www.successfulnonprofits.com to get links to her consulting firm and her podcast, and seriously both are worth your time. Be sure to check them out. By now, you are tired of hearing me say that the successful nonprofits is taking it on the road, but it’s still true. We will be at the BoardSource’s by annual Board Leadership Forum in Seattle this October 18th to the 20^th, and we will be there as the first ever podcast sponsor of this huge event. I sound like an orange guy that I don’t like, but it is. It’s a huge event. We’ll be recording over a dozen conversations with presenters of the Board Leadership Forum, and then over the coming months we will be bringing those to you as very special podcast episodes. Additionally, every day of the conference we will produce a daily podcast so that even if you cannot be there in person, you can feel like you got a little something more out of the conference now.

It would be great to see you at the conference and registration is still open at www.boardsource.org. And finally, I would be remiss to close a show on social media if I did not ask you to go online and like us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. By liking the podcast, you’ll get valuable updates while also helping others find the show. And what’s more, you might push me over 200. So, you can search for Dolph Goldenburg in the social media you use the most. You can search for the Successful Nonprofits™  Podcast there, or you can just visit our website. It’s www.successfulnonprofits.com, and the links to all of our social media pages will be there. That is our show for this week. I hope you have gained some insight that will help you, your nonprofit, thrive in a competitive environment.

(Disclaimer) I’m not an accountant or attorney, and neither I nor the Successful Nonprofits™ provide tax, legal or accounting advice. This material has been providing for informational purposes only and is not intended or should not be relied on for tax, legal, or accounting advice. Always consult a qualified licensed professional about such matters.