[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

One feature of a Facebook Page for organizations is a Favorites Pages block. This lets you bookmark other Pages that you like or somehow related to yours. It’s a great tool for cross-promoting and partnerships.

Facebook is long on features but short on usability, so figuring out how to use this feature isn’t perfectly clear. But here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the Facebook Page that you want to add to your Favorites.
2. Look at the logo on the upper-left-hand side of the page, and directly below it locate the link that says “Add to My Page’s Favorites.”
3. Click that, and it puts it in your Favorites box. Click it again to remove it from your Page’s Favorites.

If you administer more than one Page, you can choose which one to add it to.

Practice now by adding Talance’s Facebook Page to your Favorites.

Choice is something we think we want, but then when we get it, we feel overwhelmed and regret ever having asked for it. When it comes to social media, we are spoiled filthy rotten with choice. Talk about overwhelmed. Every day seems to bring a new networking tool, a new widget, a new piece of research. If you’ve put off learning about what social media can bring to your organization thus far, you’re likely to feel a solid understanding slip further away with each new day.

But learning about social media is not impossible, and you stand to gain so much by using social networking tools that it’s worth making an investment in at least understanding what they’re about.

Just to show you that you really can do it, we’re putting together a plan to get you from zero to “Oh, now I get it!” in five days. By Friday, you’ll have an understanding of the most useful social media services and the foundation for assembling your own social media plan.

Ideally, set aside an hour each day to dedicate to your one-week education. It doesn’t have to be 60 whole minutes at a time; feel free to break that up into four 15-minute chunks. You’ll probably find you know more than you thought you did and can breeze through our recommendations for the day.

Day 1: Blogs

Social media widgets may come and may go, but blogs are here to stay. They take dedication and work, but they offer the best payoff for your efforts.

Now take some time to browse through some blogs and think about how they’re structured. Don’t simply read the postings; page through them. Get your notebook out and jot down your thoughts on:

• >> Anatomy of a blog, from pages to comments to RSS feeds. How are your blogs structured? Where do the links take you?
• >> How is the blog published? Is it on a program like WordPress or Blogger? How does it fit in with the publisher’s website?
• >> Pay attention to the postings that have comments, and the ones that don’t. Do you see any patterns?
• >> Note where the publisher is focusing their blog and to whom they’re writing, as all winning blogs have a tight focus and clear audience. Audiences need to know what they’re getting.

You may already have a list of your favorites, so use those as a starting point. If you need help finding some blogs, turn to Google’s Blog Search to look up topics you want to know more about.

When you’ve spent some time reading through these blogs, jot some notes on what you like and what you think works, because you can use these notes to structure your own.

Tomorrow: get ready to learn about Facebook.

[Read the other posts in our series 5 Days to Social Media Smarts.]

Twitter updates come as fast as you can draw a sharp breath, but they may not be as spontaneous as they seem. Thanks to a selection of scheduling services, you can create tweets ahead of time and post them in the future, while you’re busy with something else.

Delayed tweeting isn’t the best strategy for building relationships with your followers (can you imagine having your half of a conversation an hour before you meet a friend for lunch?), but it can help when you want to deliver a message but aren’t able to.

For instance, if you want to notify everyone about a new project you’re launching on a set day. You can schedule the announcement to go out while you’re busy setting up said project. Or say you’re at a conference getting ready to speak. You want to tell your followers you’re about to step on stage so they’d better bustle down to the conference room, but you need to give the live audience your full attention.

Here are some tools you can use to set your tweets into the future:

• Hootsuite
• FutureTweets
• TweetLater
• Twuffer
• Calendar Tweet

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

[Photo credit: A blue lock for George by Darwin Bell, on Flickr]

E-mail lets you send a message to one person or a list of people you select. A discussion board lets you post a message to a group of members (usually). Twitter, on the other hand, lets you post a message to anybody in the world who wants to read it.

This got a participant in our recent presentation Does Twitter Matter for Nonprofits? asking:

When you broadcast, can you broadcast only to people who are following you?

It’s a great question, and one that we’re frequently asked. The short answer is yes.

Twitter explains best with this passage (which I shortened a bit. You can read the whole explanation here):

When you sign up for Twitter, you have the option of keeping your account public (the default account setting) or protecting the account to keep your updates private. Public accounts are visible to everyone. Protected accounts aren’t. Only approved followers are able to see these profile pages.

To protect your profile:

1. Log in to Twitter
2. Click Settings
3. Scroll down and check the box next to “Protect my Updates”
4. SAVE your changes.

When you navigate to your home page after protecting your profile, you’ll see a notice reminding you that your profile is now protected.

If you have a public account and you protect it, all updates after the time of protection will be protected.

Congregations have been wild to know what Twitter can do for them, proven by the powerful turnout at two presentations I’ve given on the topic.

The uses are many, but here’s a quick run-down of what I’ve found in my work with churches and synagogues, divided into clergy members (rabbis, preachers), administrators and youth group leaders. Find more tips by following Talance on Twitter, and of course, send your own.

Clergy

1. Inspirational thoughts – quotes from scripture or elsewhere
2. Motivational thoughts – calls to action and service
3. Be available to those who need you, when they need you
4. Learn more about your congregants
5. Reach out to people who aren’t able to attend your services
6. Network with other clergy members
7. Gather ideas for sermons
8. Send prayer requests
9. Identify needs for support in your community
10. Get feedback on sermons and programs

Administrators

1. Call for volunteers
2. Notifications of schedule changes
3. Event notifications
4. Event follow-ups
5. Promote newsletter
6. Promote blog
7. Promote website
8. Find out about successful events at other churches or synagogues
9. Organize events by communicating with volunteers and staff
10. Poll members on success of programs and services

Youth Group Leaders

1. Reach out to texting-addicted membership
2. Drive people to your Facebook group or MySpace page
3. Send reports to parents while on youth trips
4. Send reminders to forgetful youth
5. Make it easy for teens and kids to tell friends about events
6. Tell kids about programs
7. Send congratulations and kudos to members
8. Make it easy for shy kids to communicate with the group
9. Share camp stories and pictures
10. Send birthday wishes

Come to the 2009 Massachusetts Conference on Service and Volunteering from the Mass Service Alliance June 4 in Marlborough, MA, and you can hear Monique Cuvelier of Talance, Inc., present on how to use YouTube in your volunteering programs. You’ll see some examples of organizations that are doing it well, and how volunteers can help spread awareness.

It’s the special session on social media at the end of the conference. We’ll also be doing a drawing for a $300 Talance gift certificate, which you can use for web development or web strategy consulting, and a copy of Jill Friedman Fixler’s excellent book Boomer Volunteer Engagement: Collaborate Today, Thrive Tomorrow, published by Volunteer Match.

Plus you can pick up a free – yes, free! – copy of our 2009 Massachusetts Non-Profit Social Media Report at our table in the poster session.

Hope to see you there!

[Welcome to the Talance Friendly E-mail Newsletter. This is text of the issue our e-mail subscribers just received. Sign up on the lower right-hand side of the Talance homepage.]

Hi, Friends!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? And how much is that video worth if it travels virally, propelled by someone other than you, and saves you effort and boosts awareness of your organization?

In short, a lot.

Many of you have figured that out already. You turn to YouTube to learn about other organizations, for tutorials and movies from your friends and colleagues. And you’ve seen that free and wide-reaching video-sharing sites not only let you tell a story through moving pictures, but they open up the conversation to your fans. This means they can sing your praises for you, and you have a chance to build a stronger relationship with them.

We’re so excited to be presenting on just this topic at Massachusetts Service Alliance’s 2009 Conference on Service and Volunteering on June 4 in Marlborough, Mass. Learn more and register here: http://www.mass-service.org/

Our own Monique Cuvelier will be presenting the closing session, Using YouTube in Volunteer Programs. We hope you can come and learn a bit about engaging volunteers through video and share some of your stories. We’ll also be holding a drawing for a $300 Talance gift certificate and a copy of Jill Friedman-Fixler’s book Boomer Volunteer Engagement: Collaborate Today, Thrive Tomorrow.

If you can’t make it, but you’re on Twitter, you can follow the discussion at #MCVS.

Remember that Talance is offering a 30-minute free webinar on Does Twitter Matter for Non-Profits?, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 from 2-2:30pm Eastern. Learn how you can make sense of this madly growing tool and how it applies to you.

»Register for this free webinar now!

Have a technology question? Ask it, and we’ll answer! We answer a reader question in the blog every week for the benefit of everybody. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking – no question is stupid!) and get back to you with a response.

»Ask a Tech Question

The most popular recent posts on Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog. Make sure you’re reading http://talance.com/blog and sign up for the news feed.

Reader Question: How Do People Find Me on Twitter?
Description of a few ways people might be finding you on Twitter.

Do Your Own Social Media Survey
The best way to figure out what social media to invest in is to ask the people you’re trying to reach.

Spring Clean Your Website
How to tidy up the messiness that worked its way into your website over the winter.

Who Uses YouTube
Everybody knows it’s full of 15-year-olds lip-synching to pop songs. Right? Wrong.

Why is your synagogue using Twitter?
It’s happening ever so slowly, but more and more synagogues are beginning to experiment with Twitter. Why are you?

Make a Better Website with a User Survey
Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important.

Every Door on Your Website Is an Entryway
One of the mistakes people often make is assuming visitors come to a website only through the homepage.

Working Your Out-of-Office Reply While You’re Away
Get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it.

Need Some Help?

Talance has helped clients launch scores of projects, ranging from websites to online newsletters to CRM projects. Please click here to schedule a time to talk about your next project or to request a proposal.

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As social networks spread and become more intricately woven, words like “meme” (rhymes with “dream”) are used frequently, in particular “Internet meme.”

Internet meme, n. an idea or catchphrase that spreads quickly from person to person online.

Examples of Internet memes are LOLcats or Twitter hashtags like #charitytuesday. Wired magazine features Meme Alerts, have a look at some of the ones they’ve discovered.

Pepole make studies of memes. You can read more from this helpful article in Straight Dope and The Lifecycle of Memes.

It’s happening ever so slowly, but more and more synagogues are beginning to experiment with Twitter. Check out who’s there now by going to http://twitter.com/synagogue. Churches and non-profits have cottoned on to Twitter a while ago (check out this recent article from Time magazine), but it’s been moving much slower and with more contention in the Jewish sphere.

Twitter, for those of you who haven’t yet decided to fiddle with it yet, is a utility that lets you send a 140-character message to your community of subscribers. It’s a bit like how Reuters news service delivers stories to newspapers around the country, but you’re the Reuters, and the newspapers around the country are anybody in the world who’s interested in what you have to say. If you want to see it in action, you can follow Talance at http://twitter.com/talance or @talance.

Like any social media tool, Twitter can be useful as long as you think carefully about how you’re going to use it and work it into your overall communication plan. You can find it’s useful for attracting volunteers or promoting events.

We’re wondering how many of you synagogues have thought about how you’re using Twitter, so we put together this poll. Take a few seconds (it’s super short) to answer why you’re using Twitter. We’ll post the results here when the poll is up.

If you’re NOT using Twitter, use the comments below to tell us why you’ve decided to give it a pass.

[Our clients at Talance ask us web strategy and tech questions all the time. In the spirit of giving, we’ll be answering your reader questions here in the blog every week. Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page or click here. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

John K. asks:

How are people finding me on Twitter? I keep getting messages that people are following me, but I don’t know how they found me.

First of all, John, congratulations on your burgeoning Twitter network! The fact that people are finding you proves your account is doing what it’s supposed to do: connect you to more people.

There are a few ways people might be finding you on Twitter, including these common methods:

Someone looked for you on Twitter. If you click Find People in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, you can use a variety of methods to find people you know. The first option is a search, where someone could have searched for your username, first or last name.

Someone uploaded their address book to their Twitter account, and you were in it. If you allow it, Twitter will fetch your address book from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail or MSN and perform a quick match between the people in the that address book and the people who have Twitter accounts.

Someone they know is following you, or vice versa. You can see a list of followers on any profile page on Twitter. So if you’re following your local dog club’s Twitter account, anybody who looks at the list of followers on the dog club’s page can find you, and follow you, from there.

Someone saw a post you made. Any time you send a post to Twitter, it’s marked with @ and your username, such as @talance. So if I made a comment on my dog club’s Twitter page, anyone can click the @talance next to my comment and follow me that way.

Send us your tech questions by using the comments form at the bottom of this page or click here. We’ll review your question before posting, and get back to you with a response. Oh, and you can follow Talance on Twitter too: @talance