Beth Kanter and Allison Fine led an NTEN, Ask the Expert session on Wednesday October 28th. The call was very informative, to listen click here. The take away lesson that stuck with me the most was the motto: “Do it, Try it, Fix it”. This is a great way to approach your social media strategy.

I know jumping into social media can be scary. However, you should find solace in knowing that people have short memories and because of the huge quantities of information pushed through social media websites their attention span is even shorter. So, stop worrying and jump in! You do not need to wait for the perfect social media strategy to come along before you start using these tools to promote your nonprofit. The truth is, your social media strategy, like all of your strategies needs to continuously adapt over time.

Don’t try everything at once. That will be extremely overwhelming and decrease your overall productivity.You do not have to jump into everything. Pick one social media website. Set up a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a Ning community or a LinkedIn account and play around. No action you take will lead to your complete failure within that network. But if you don’t start working on these social media websites you can never reach these audiences.

Once you have an account there are many ways to track your success. The easiest is to track the growth of your community, but others will also work. Actions that you take that do not work- stop. And actions that result in a huge growth- continue. But you can’t figure out what works for you from the sidelines.

Another point made on the call is that social media is a contact sport. To gain anything from it you need to get off the bench and into the game. Once you are in the game you can adjust your plays, but you have to be in the game first.