Social Media Benchmarks for Nonprofits

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In the rapidly evolving world of social media, nonprofits are scrambling to find meaningful metrics for their social network outreach.

We know social media has two core metrics - influence and engagement. If we want to know how we can engage our communities, we need to understand what to measure. 

Dedicated to helping people advance their missions in order to bring about positive change, M&R wrote a benchmarks paper with the hope of shedding some light on the world of online social media. They focused on Facebook and Twitter because they have emerged as the favorites among most nonprofits for building relationships with supporters.

Here are some key findings:

Twitter

Tweets by Organization

The organizations in our data set sent on average four to five tweets per day. Tweet frequency varied widely – total tweets for the entire month of November ranged from 21 for the American Red Cross to 461 for Greenpeace, for example.

Follower Growth

The average monthly follower growth for our Twitter sample was 9% – much higher than average monthly growth on both Facebook Fan pages (3.75%) and nonprofit email lists (1.4%). It is worth noting that Twitter itself has seen exponential growth – unique visitors grew by 1,200% from November 2008 to November 2009.

As with Facebook, a primary driver of follower growth is the ability for followers to share, or retweet, an organization's message on Twitter with their own followers. In the  sample they found a trend relating tweets to follower growth: more tweets lead to more retweets, which lead in turn to more follower growth. The more you tweet, the more new followers you'll gain. Of course, this assumes your tweets are worth reading! The organizations in this sample have built solid followings, presumably because their content is engaging.

Facebook

Fan Base Size

Facebook Pages provide a way for supporters, known as "fans" in Facebook lingo, to interact with nonprofits and other fans. However, many nonprofits are still learning how to effectively use Pages to engage and grow a fan base. Study participants had a wide range of fan base sizes, ranging from 2,000 to nearly 210,000 on their Facebook Pages.

Fan Growth

The more fans an organization has, the more friends of fans will be reached per staff hour spent on Facebook; but growth rates can be compared across fan base size. The study found an average fan growth rate of 3.75% per month. It's worth noting that this is a much faster rate of growth than that of email lists, as reported in the last eNonprofit Benchmarks Study. (The 2009 study found an annual email list growth rate of 17%, or about 1.4% per month.)

The overall growth rate for Facebook itself is high – with another 50 million users added between September and December of 2009 alone.

Fan Churn

As with email, it's important to track when, how, and why supporters come and go. A fan can navigate to a nonprofit's Page and click the "Remove me from Fans" link or choose to "hide" the organization's news feed on her profile.

Based on their findings, it's "easy come, easy go" in the world of social media. Organizations should expect both faster growth and higher churn than they see with their email list. 

Posts by Organizations

On average, participating organizations posted on their walls six times each week. Over a two-month period, the study partners posted as many as eight and as few as three times per week.

The data suggested that there was a correlation between a higher number of posts and higher fan churn. However, the data also suggested that more posts also allowed more fan growth. They recommend that each organization should establish baseline metrics and then work to find their fans' "sweet spot" between too many and too few posts.

How should an organization put these social networking benchmarks to work?

Focus on tracking your own activity, so you can compare it to these benchmarks. Each organization is unique – just as with email, there is no "one size fits all" approach to social media nor is there any one key metric to try to hit. Measure where you are now, and focus on improving those results over time.

Make sure your content is engaging – that's the first thing to look at if your fans aren't responding at the same rates as other groups. Pay attention to the post styles and topics that yield the biggest fan response. Fan actions translate into free advertisement for your Page in fan news feeds, and that will spur growth.

How many posts are too many? The answer to this question will depend on your organization. As with email, fans will probably be forgiving of heavier posting during critical moments – such as when a key piece of legislation is on the move, or when there’s a mission-related emergency. Run a Pages report on a monthly basis, and look at the trends after periods of heavy posting to see the impact on your fan growth and churn rates.

To read the full report