What are nonprofits doing on social media?

What are nonprofits doing on social media? Craig Newmark and RAD campaigns have a taken a look and reported their findings in two infographics:

• How the Top 50 Nonprofits Do Social Media – http://craigconnects.org/infographic
• Who Rules Social Media – http://craigconnects.org/infographic-2

Among the most interesting findings:

• Big budgets and big social media presence are not correlated. The organization with the most revenue – the YMCA – has fewer Facebook fans and Twitter followers than the 50th organization in terms of revenue – the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
• There’s no strong correlation between the number of Facebook “likes” an organization has and the number of comments its content engenders. The second-most liked organization on Facebook (World Vision, as of the end of September) wasn’t in the top five most commented organizations on Facebook.
• Big growth requires investment. After hiring a full time social media manager, ASPCA’s Twitter followers nearly doubled to 75,000 and their Facebook fans grew to over a million.

As organizations, causes, and associations are increasingly expected to “do” social media, an accounting of what that means for the biggest non-profits is good to have.

But not enough to act on.

So, this week we offer up three things you can do to make Craig’s information actionable for you:

1. Know your “so what?”

If you could wave a magic wand and double your Facebook fans and quadruple your Twitter followers tomorrow, what would you hope would be the result?

More donations? More advocacy actions? More people showing up to volunteer next weekend?

Be sure that if you were to have RAD campaigns create an infographic of your social media work, it would include some notion of impact.

For more on this, see an oldie but goodie e-book Shayna wrote with Shabbir Safdar: Is your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It? (a PDF file). While some of the details have changed as Facebook has changed, the gist still applies, as does the task list.

2. Inventory your metrics.

Craig and RAD Campaigns took a look at presence – number of fans and followers, number of posts, etc. – and also what that presence inspired.

Do you know how many comments per post you get on average?  How many mentions per tweet?

Take a look at what you’re tracking and make sure it’s up to date with what is possible and makes a difference to your social media effectiveness.

3. Pick one thing to try to improve.

Maybe your organization posts plenty, but never responds to comments thus limiting your potential for engaging folks in your work.  Pick that to improve on over the next quarter.

Set a goal (say, at least one response or retweet per day), dedicate resources (maybe 15 minutes of someone’s time every day), decide on how you’ll measure success, and get to work on getting better at just one piece of your social media work.

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