Spreading Awareness and Creating Buzz

Social media tools can help you spread awareness and generate buzz about your organization's programs or campaigns. In the social media world, this is known as "going viral."

When you share your message with enthusiastic supporters, they in turn may choose to pass it to others with a similar interest in your organization or campaign. But first, you have to build trust, credibility and - most importantly - a relationship with those who might interact with your posted content.

Why is this important?

Using social media to spread awareness is an excellent method for generating web traffic and visible support for your cause in the form of comments and other forms of engagement. Social media is also great for getting at certain audiences, particularly younger people. Best of all, it is very low cost.

Referrals from Twitter or StumbleUpon can be longer lasting than search engine results. But you should be aware that it may take a while before you have the ability to leverage your connections on these networks in order to generate large waves of web traffic.

What are some tips for spreading awareness or generating buzz?

Be a good member of the community: promote others even more than you promote yourself (i.e., "treat others as you would have them treat you"). Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
The creative material or your message should be something that people want to share - newsworthy, controversial, timeliness, immediate usefulness, and even humor all work well
Don't spam: a good rule is to make one post of your own content for every 5-10 posts that link to other sites
Don't digg/stumble/link/tweet every single piece of your content. Save it only for your very best
Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails or make too many posts of just your own content. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it!