logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

Nonprofit Social Media Measurement: Tools and Tips for Tracking

Steve Boland
March 13, 2013
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
Measure
marekuliasz / Shutterstock.com

The social media sphere is just another set of tools, though if you read the hype, you might think it’s either the savior of all nonprofit efforts or a demonic force causing poor reading scores and tooth decay. For nonprofits, the promise of social tools is rooted in the passion supporters have for mission-focused work combined with the nearly free implementation cost for many of these tools. Nonprofits love free (and are okay with nearly-free), and so perhaps the sector is, even more so than some others, prone to leaping before looking at how to make social work well.

NPQ has previously written about not chasing raw Twitter counts as well as the power of dark social for nonprofits. These topics all beg the question: what are nonprofits measuring in order to understand whether our social media engagement activities are getting us what we want and need to achieve our missions? The number of “likes” on Facebook has some value, but engagement in social circles is where we get the most reward. Luckily for frugal nonprofits, there are tools that make measuring this engagement easier.

Nonprofits can create links to improve their measurement capacity. For instance, a social message saying, “Hey, we’re great! Please tell other people!” is nice, but how about a message like this: “Hey, we’re great! Look at this report on how we’ve helped 200 new homebuyers this year! http://ow.ly/iOJOV.” Not only does the latter message offer some specific information (remember: content is king!), but it also provides you with a link that you can measure. You could also link directly to a page on your own site and then use Google Analytics to measure the impact. However, providing a custom link in your social posts like the one above allows you to track the real flow of traffic from a Tweet or post to a specific page.

Still, the gulf between posting something to social media and actually having readers interact with it is huge. Facebook is screening most of your stuff away from readers. Twitter feeds go by in the blink of an eye. How do you know what is actually being read?

A great starting tool is a social media aggregator/publisher that can do some tracking for you.  Services like HootSuite or TweetDeck provide some basic reporting not just on how many followers you have on various networks, but also on how many links were clicked and from which service. Custom reporting is also available, but now we are leaving the land of our beloved “free stuff” and entering the terrain where we might have to start paying for the specifics. These reports provide a great window into what your readers/followers actually find interesting enough to click on. An important cautionary note, however: Facebook deprecates posts from aggregator sites, meaning your aggregator-driven measurement plan may come at a visibility cost on Facebook.

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Even without social aggregator software, however, any nonprofit can still set some basic measures. Look for re-tweets on Twitter, shares on Facebook, and plus-ones on the Google sites. This will at least tell you whether someone read what you did and whether he or she thought it worthy of passing along. The trick is to set up specific goals and measures, and then to assign staff a deadline to report on them. Google Analytics and Facebook are good at making such reporting fairly easy, but Twitter is not so great at providing analytics data so using an outside source to track links may be better for that social media site.

Here’s a Twitter pro tip: if you’re interested in measuring a short burst of activity aimed at a specific purpose, hashtags can add a lot of value. If you’re going to engage in hashtag measurement, however, you must first make sure that your hashtag is unique (as your measurements won’t be accurate if some other nonprofit is also tweeting up #GivingIsNice at the same time that you are trying to track your social media push with this tag). So undertake a quick search to make sure the hashtag you want to measure is unique. Then, you may be able to take a closer look at which messages within that overarching hashtag have traction and which have merely floated by in the stream.

Just as your audiences may use different social networks, your strategy must be to measure different audiences. Facebook may have the most members, but Twitter tends to offer more engagement. Google Plus might connect you with niche audiences that avoid those other services, and Pinterest is great when you want to convey your goals visually. Wherever your nonprofit spends its social media time, be sure to include measurable goals for your engagement there. Without specific measures, there’s no way to tell if all those “likes” are real engagement with your organization or just courtesy.


 

Steve Boland lives at the intersection of community, policy and technology. Steve holds a Master of Nonprofit Management degree from Hamline University, and is a regular contributor to Nonprofit Quarterly. He can be reached at [email protected] or twitter.com/steveboland.

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Boland

Steve Boland is the managing partner of Next in Nonprofits, a consulting and writing firm in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He holds a Master of Nonprofit Management from Hamline University and is a regular contributor to Nonprofit Quarterly.

More about: Management and LeadershipSocial MediaTrends

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

NPQ_Winter_2022Subscribe Today
You might also like
Hierarchy and Justice
Cyndi Suarez
Salvadoran Foreign Agent Law Threatens Human Rights Movements
Devon Kearney
Charitable Tax Reform: Why Half Measures Won’t Curb Plutocracy
Alan Davis
Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation
Shawn A. Ginwright
Into the Fire: Lessons from Movement Conflicts
Ingrid Benedict, Weyam Ghadbian and Jovida Ross
How Nonprofits Can Truly Advance Change
Hildy Gottlieb

Popular Webinars

Remaking the Economy

Black Food Sovereignty, Community Stories

Register Now

Combating Disinformation and Misinformation in 21st-Century Social Movements

Register Now

Remaking the Economy

Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

Register Now
You might also like
Hierarchy and Justice
Cyndi Suarez
Salvadoran Foreign Agent Law Threatens Human Rights...
Devon Kearney
Charitable Tax Reform: Why Half Measures Won’t Curb...
Alan Davis

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.