Are Twitter and Facebook Playing Tug-O-War?

A few days ago, I reported some of the juicy details from the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study that was just released showing data from 2012. There were 55 of the country’s leading nonprofits surveyed for this study, including the American Red Cross, Oceana, American Heart Association, AARP, and Human Rights Watch.

In my last blog post, I talked about the decline of email and fundraising response rates. Today I'm digging into the the social media and mobile portions of the study.

As social media continues to grow and develop, nonprofit organizations continue to attract more Fans and Followers—Twitter Followers in particular have increased at a remarkable rate, with a whopping 264% growth over the past year. 

Despite this growth, email lists continue to dominate in size (no real surprise here), and Facebook remains the larger social media presence for most groups. For every 1,000 email subscribers, groups in the Benchmarks Study have 149 Facebook Fans, 53 Twitter Followers, and 29 Mobile Subscribers.

Facebook:

• You may be wondering, how often do other organizations post on Facebook? On average they're posting about once per day, though large groups posted twice as frequently.
• Users were more than twice as likely to like, share, or comment on a Photo post than any other content.  

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Ramp Up Fundraising & Monthly Giving with Social Media

Last week, Care2 held another great webinar about the benefits of cross-channel integration for nonprofits featuring Paul Habig of Sankynet, Sarah Alexander of Food & Water Watch, and Care2's own Eric Rardin.

Why should your organization integrate its donor channels?

-Increases donor response rate
-Increases the average gift
-Increases the long-term value of donors

Sankynet's Paul Habig provides tips for how to build social media into your email and website to spread your message, and how to identify the people on your email list that are on Facebook without annoying them. Food & Water Watch's Sarah Alexander sums up 10 key steps that your organization can take to launch an effective, well-integrated fundraising campaign.

For more tips like these, listen to the web recording here or view the slides below.

Monthly Donors, Social Media, and Cross Channel Integration: Critical Tactics to Boost Your Fundraising in 2013 from Care2Team

Don't forget to check out past presentations from Care2team.

A Photo A Day Keeps Lack of Engagement Away

How many photos do you take a day? A week? Do you capture your nonprofit's monthly potluck? The office plant that just bloomed? How about your office mascot? Or more importantly, that special dinner with donors? Or awesome volunteers helping out at your major events?

They say that a photo is worth a thousand words. And if nothing else, it's worth a whole lot of social engagement.

In the realm of social media, this infographic, Storytelling One Frame at a Time, explores just how photos and videos are ruling social media, and why you should jump on this social bandwagon if you haven't already.

What this infographic reveals:

• On Facebook, videos are shared 12 times more than links and text posts combined.
• Photos are Liked 2 times more than text updates are on Facebook.  
• On Facebook's top 10 brand pages, photos and videos drive the most engagement.
• A whopping 42% of all Tumblr posts are photos.
• Photos on Pinterest are referring more traffic than Twitter, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Where is your audience talking? A recent study by app analytics firm found Instagram has become the second-most-popular app behind Facebook globally. People are so busy nowadays with managing so many different tools and apps, from social platforms, to email, to real life relationships, and it's a lot work. It's much easier for some people, and a lot less time consuming, to glance at photos to see what's new with your favorite organizations vs. reading whole articles all the time. Try sharing your news via photographs with engaging captions; it's what folks are looking for.

 

Instagram has 30.3 million monthly users on mobile (even President Obama joined Instagram in January), and more than 5 billion photos have been shared.

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