When many groups think of social media strategy, they think of their organization’s Facebook and Twitter pages. While maintaining a well-run social media page is important, it’s missing the most important part of social media–the social part. Here are a couple of reasons to rethink your social media strategy beyond your Facebook page.

Your Posts Have A Short Half-Life

There are dozens of tools that help organizations find the right time to tweet, and you can spend hours trying to find the perfect moment to post. But it’s important to consider that your tweet will receive most of its clicks in the first 24 minutes after posting. After that, people will have moved on to other content coming in through their social media fire hose.

Pouring analytics into your own account can only get you so far, and finding the right moment to tweet doesn’t do all that much if you only have the internal capacity to tweet once or twice each day. To reach more people, your organization will either need to start producing enough content to satiate the social media universe’s huge appetite, or you’ll need to enlist help from your supporters to share your content more widely.

Your Reach Is Probably Shrinking

Even if your account has tens of thousands of followers, only a small fraction of those fans will ever see your posts.

Every time Facebook tweaks their algorithms, brands and organizations notice decreasing reach on from their pages. And although there are tricks that can improve your Facebook reach, this doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t using Facebook to interact with organizations; they’re using it to interact with their friends. It’s a safe bet that Facebook will continue to adjust their algorithms to help people see posts they want from friends.

Your Audience Is Ready To Help

The reach of your organization’s tweets and posts is tiny compared to the combined reach of your audience. You have one page on Facebook, but your community has thousands. By optimizing social sharing, you can take optimize what your community is sharing. For non-profits with passionate supporters, this can be a game changer.

Your fans are real people with real friends. By recruiting them to advocate for your cause, you have an important spokesperson on your side.

ShareProgress provides tested and optimized after-action share pages to encourage your supporters to share after they’ve taken an action with your organization. A share from a supporter who has just donated or engaged in a campaign can be very persuasive to their friends; your supporter’s donation or action is social proof of the credibility and impact of your organization’s work.

Not only can your supporters be very effective at promoting your message, but your organization is likely to have many supporters who are ready to promote your message. ShareProgress can help you craft a better message for your supporters as they share with social sharing A/B testing.

So next time you’re thinking about your social media strategy, make sure to consider social sharing by your community. Given what a difference your audience can make, it’ll be well worth it.