Social media has changed the world. It has changed how we access information, communicate with our friends and it has changed how charities raise awareness and fundraise. In fact, most charities now spend countless hours and money investing in their social media channels and it is time to stop.

A recent report found that entrepreneurs say social media is a waste of time, with no discernible impact on their sales, and I believe the same could be said for charities.

In theory, social media connects you to over a billion people who are active on Facebook or 320 million on Twitter. But in reality it’s far fewer than that.

Hardly anyone sees what people are posting

Facebook’s newsfeed now only shows the posts it thinks are most relevant to its users, so messages may only reach 2.6% of a charity’s audience. On average, a tweet only reaches around 10% of followers, and the average click-through rate for a link on Twitter is around 1.6%. So it is likely that just a small fraction of the public will see the posts or make it to the charity’s website.

If that tiny audience is more likely to do the things that truly matter to the charity in question, then maybe this small reach is OK, but the problem is they often don’t. Social media traffic has a high bounce rate, which means that even if people do click through on a post or tweet most are going to leave the charity’s website immediately.

I’m not suggesting charities should immediately shut down their social media accounts, especially if they have checked the data and confirmed it works for them. Instead, they need to think carefully about how resources are allocated. What if they reallocated the same people, money and effort into places that are proven to reach the audience who need the charity most?

Get to grips with Google

One way to improve might be to dedicate resources to search engine optimisation (SEO). The public turn to Google rather than social media when they want information, including giving and receiving help. This is evident from the 3.5bn Google searches that happen every day, searches that now include Twitter content in the results.

Charities’ websites and blog posts can turn up in those searches after a few simple changes. A cat adoption charity, for example, could edit the titles of its web pages and content to include the most searched for terms (Keyword Planner will identify them) in that specialism, like cats and kittens for adoption.

Maximise your use of email

Most charities have dormant email lists of thousands of people who actively signed up to receive emails. So this cat adoption charity could send more emails with just one subject, say a particular kitten they could adopt, and a link to their website to find out more.

Doing this could alert subscribers who already know and like the charity to content they never knew existed before.

Think about where people are online

Charities should reach people where they are, and allocate more resources to creating strong web content, search engine optimisation, and using Google’s AdWords programme, which allows charities to advertise content on search results. In the example above, their ad could show up any time someone searches for kittens to adopt.

When people find a charity via organic or paid Google search results, they are much more likely to want to hear what it has to say, because they were searching for that topic at the time. When they are sent an email, they receive it because they actively asked to be on a list. If they see that same link on social media, when they were probably there to catch up with friends and family, they are unlikely to be in the state of mind to read a charity’s content.

It’s time to step away from the belief that charities have to be on social media and need to invest in it. It’s not the best marketing tool we have. Let’s look at the data, and focus our limited resources on what we can prove works.

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