Nonprofits are on social networking sites, but few are measuring data

As nonprofits become more digitally connected, organizations are finding a greater need to measure the performance of the platforms they’re using. Social networking sites provide plenty of data for organizations that can help them determine how to use these platforms effectively.

Social media adoption in the nonprofit sphere

A recent survey from Bloomerang cited by HubSpot found that the majority of nonprofits believe social media is either “very valuable” or “moderately valuable.” Consequently, 98 percent of these organizations are on Facebook, while nearly 70 percent are on Twitter.

Also, the report found that 38 percent of nonprofits spend one to two hours per week on social media. Around 30 percent spend between three and five hours. However, when it comes to social media staff, most nonprofits are winging it. Forty-four percent have just one person monitoring social media accounts. Not surprisingly, this means a significant number of nonprofits (53 percent) aren’t measuring their social media accounts at all. An even higher percentage, 67 percent, have no documented social media strategy, policies, or goals.

How to measure social media performance

As social media becomes an increasingly important part of communications, nonprofits are going to have to start focusing harder on these platforms. One of the difficult parts can be determining what information is important to track. An infographic from Infographic World outlines some of the top metrics that nonprofits should consider when starting to measure social platforms. These are a few of the top concerns:

Referring traffic

Using Google Analytics, organizations can determine how much traffic is being directed to the website from various social platforms.

Quality of content

It can be hard to gauge your content’s quality using data, but you can determine how people are responding to it. Using Google Analytics, you can determine the number of unique page views and time spent on each page.

Share of voice

Social listening tools like SocialMention can help nonprofits determine their reach on social platforms. This can be made into a simple equation, according to the infographic. Divide the number of conversations and mentions of similar nonprofits by your organization’s total number of conversations and mentions to come up with a usable metric.

Engagement

Using tools provided by the platforms you can measure whether your network is growing and how often followers are engaging with your content.

When nonprofits get better at using and measuring social media, they will likely see donations and brand recognition grow as well.