#HOWTO: Link Your Tumblr Post To Other Social Networks

Social networks build connections and interactions, sometimes in surprising ways. Long before such networks were presumed to be online, nonprofits have strived to make connections, have friends influence friends, and spread their good work by word-of-mouth. Now that much of that socializing is taking place electronically, nonprofits need to offer numerous opportunities to disseminate their information. Plenty of evidence shows that a Facebook page is expected for nonprofits, even though little fundraising or communication will come directly from there. Blogging and Tweeting seem to encourage far more engagement than Facebook.

One of the many beauties of Tumblr is that it’s designed to link your blog posts to your Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feed. So you can keep the accounts your community already has running, develop a blog site via Tumblr, and easily connect the three or four! Here’s how:

We start this Tumblr tutorial on the assumption that your nonprofit or charity already has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or both. We will introduce the RSS feed feature here today, and discuss what an RSS feed is and why it might prove valuable for your organization.

You’ve planned your blogging strategy, you’ve allocated resources for research and writing, picked your Tumblr theme, and now you have your first post ready to fire! When it goes live, and each time a post goes live, you should have Tumblr send out the relevant update to Twitter and to Facebook. These two tools will bring in readers to the images, ideas, calls-to-action, and donation appeals that your (free!) Tumblr site can explain and facilitate.

As we pointed out in our earlier posts concerning Tumblr, content is prepared via your account’s ‘Dashboard’ and the look and connectivity of the site are tweaked in your own blog’s settings. Click on your blog at the upper right, then the ‘Blog Settings’ in the menu on the right (See the screenshot on the right). Those settings include things like your portrait (better yet: your logo) and your blog’s URL. Please note: if you are paying for a domain name, you can use Tumblr and keep that name – no need to print new business cards or warn followers of a move.

Further down, you can click the options to connect to Facebook and Twitter. The process for both is quite the same: Click each box and a pop-up window, well…, pops up for you to sign into the account (See the screenshot on the left). Each blog is allowed but one link, so if your organization is large enough to have subdivided tweets among accounts, you will have to pick the one that links to your Tumblr blog. The sign-in credentials to that account will be remembered, and future posts will automatically be mirrored on your other SM platforms.

The next possibility is to link to a FeedBurner/Google RSS account, which might take some explaining, so we’ll tackle it next week.

Blogging has proven to be the most effective means to keep audiences and supporters engaged with various topics and organizations. Tumblr’s platform helps your nonprofit do that, while still enjoying regular contact with the following you have already built up on other social-media platforms. The extra investment is a mere few minutes to type in your credentials to those platforms in Tumblr. Then you automatically reach out to three different sets of followers via three important media.