Benefits of Social Media Monitoring for Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations use social media every single day. They use it to connect with people and raise awareness about great causes. Also, social media is a great source for fundraising for which nonprofit organizations can spread a word. In fact, around 55% of people engaged with social media get motivated to take further actions. Thus, we can say that a combination of social media and nonprofit organizations is a good match. But, how do you optimize social media presence? Well, you will see thousands of people involved but, we can’t deny the importance of social media monitoring.
The World Wide Fund For Nature that focuses on different environmental issues is facing the biggest challenge of climate change. Climate change is the cause of rising sea levels and increased temperatures. So, to spread a word about it, they launched Earth Hour.
Earth hour is a social media campaign that is organized on every last Saturday of March. It calls everyone, be it individuals or businesses to switch off their lights for one hour from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM. We can say that it was a great initiative to tackle climate change and preserve the world’s wilderness.
25th March 2017 marked the 10th anniversary. Millions of people joined the movement and turned their lights off for an hour. WWF used the #EarthHour to urge followers that generated over 2 billion impressions. So, you can imagine the depth and intensity of impact a social media campaign can make. Take a look at the complete video here.
Now, the question is, how do nonprofit organizations enjoy social media monitoring? Read further to learn how social media can benefit charities and related organizations.
How Do Social Media Monitoring Benefit Nonprofit Organizations?
Social media monitoring is beneficial for nonprofit organizations. It sets the way to establish connectivity with the right people and discover important insights, which are supported by data. Further, you will see several other benefits that can compel people to learn and connect with a cause. Some of the top benefits are listed below –
- It helps what triggers people to take initiative and donate.
- Identify current trends and craft campaigns to appeal to the general public.
- Establish connections with supporters and people who are interested in such campaigns.
- To join in new conversations and understand what’s on people’s minds that help to be prompt. And, resolve queries and complaints.
- Determine which strategy works in your favor.
- Understand the best source or channels to establish communications.
- Connect with popular and relevant social media influencers to give momentum to your mission.
- To gauge their level of awareness amongst the audience.
- Reputation management in times of crisis.
- To check brand mentions and its impact in different areas.
- To know more about buzz on social media and measure sentiment surrounding the buzz.
Social Media Monitoring to Track Success of Nonprofit Organizations
Social media monitoring is essential to track the success of campaigns. It has set the way for many nonprofit organizations to amplify their message more aggressively.
Save the Children Action Network (SCAN), had run its email campaign that advocated early childhood education in the US to remain non-partisan.
After the election results on Nov. 6, 2016, they sent an email message with a neutral tone, reflecting its nonpartisan stance. They learned through their social media tool that their supporters backed Hillary Clinton. This insight instigated them to take a second look at their strategy. This is how they credit social media listening for the success of their campaign.
How Social Media Monitoring Can Help Nonprofits?
● Understand what triggers your people
Social media has plenty of information. Here, people can pick pieces of information according to their likes and preferences. Taking note of their preferences and interests you can craft a stunning piece of content for them.
● Establish sound relationships with the media
Social media supports when you want people to hear the voices of those in dire need. Here, news events and journalists play an important role. They turn out to be one of the best sources or channels to establish communication on Social media. Social media monitoring helps track those journalists and media outlets who are keeping close tabs on your cause. This can offer you great opportunities to support your mission and move ahead to build a better community.
● Establish connectivity with potential donors and volunteers
As social media creates a lot of buzz around an event, it connects several like-minded people. These people follow your ideology and share the same belief system. Social media monitoring helps you find such people who want to volunteer or contribute to help you better run your social campaigns.
You can begin tracking keywords related to your non-profit organization or your cause. It will help you identify strong influencers, donors, and volunteers who can contribute greatly to your cause and promote your mission.
● Reputation management
Reputation is of great significance when it comes to a nonprofit organization.
Moreover, don’t be afraid to join in conversations and groups and understand the audience’s mood. It will only help you implement the best practices and calm down people who may be upset and don’t support your cause. If they tend to be aggressive, give them a route to voice their opinion through your channel. Such angry people can be easily persuaded when:
● Costs and budget control
To make your message reach a large number of audiences, your organization may use paid social media marketing. However, nonprofit organizations are under the pressure to keep the expenses down. Social media monitoring can greatly help to control costs by customization and stop running campaigns that are not yielding positive results.
Social Media KPIs for Non Profit Organizations
Now that you know the benefits of social media monitoring for your nonprofit organization, you need to know what to focus on. There are several elements that can be of great help for nonprofit organizations.
Here is the list of important KPIs that you need to track to have an in-depth analysis. Track these performance indicators to track the success of your nonprofit organization:
Reach
With 3.5 billion social media users, reach is an important KPI to track.
When you are running a social media campaign for your nonprofit organization, you should know how many people it’s reaching. It is the number of people who came across your nonprofit organization on social media.
As revenue is not the important parameter for you, but your reach shows the success of your social media campaigns. Here are some parameters that shows how far your message has travelled:
- Your followers count to determine the number of people your message has reached to.
- Your impressions to determine whether your message appears on their newsfeed or not.
- Your website traffic to understand how many people went to your website out of curiosity.
- Increasing number of social media conversations to determine the success rate of the buzz around your brand.
Engagement
Engagement is also important to understand the impact your message or campaign has been created. It refers to the number of times your audience has engaged. It gives you the number of people who have connected to your organization on social media.
This further helps you understand as to how many backs your cause and how many are there to criticize your campaign.
Your huge fan following on social media indicates a great level of engagement. Social media monitoring tracks the number of people who are sharing your content, liking it, and commenting on finding it useful. Here are some important considerations for nonprofit organizations while measuring the engagement:
- Number of clicks because those who click to see your content are more likely to convert. They turn to be your loyal followers and support you in your cause.
- Likes are also important because the more likes you get on your content, the more attention you get. It indicates that you have started cultivating qualified leads for your social cause.
- Number of shares that your audience does are also important indicators of their loyalty towards your brand. Make sure to track your shares and retweets. It determines whether your audience wants to recommend your content or not.
- Comments are a major factor that spark conversation and garner desired attention. The more comments you get, the more it interests your target audience. Even if you get negative comments, you have got so much to learn from them and improve.
- Make sure to track your brand mentions to see how people talk about your non-profit company.
Conversion
When we talk about conversions, it is always defined in terms of sales. But, when it comes to nonprofit organizations, conversions refer to the number of people who voluntarily donated for a noble cause.
Conversions are important and need to be tracked to measure the success of the campaign. They give you a clear picture rather than likes and comments, which is not enough. You must know the ROI of your social media campaigns in terms of inquiry it generated, people coming in the support, and voluntary donations.
Make sure that your supporters on the social media page help you in donor retention and generate revenue enough to make a deep impact. Here are some key considerations to make while measuring conversions:
- Revenue is not the right parameter to judge. Consider the number of direct and indirect donations coming in from your campaigns.
- Apart from this, consider important contacts established from the social media campaign. Make sure to track people who sign up for a newsletter on your website, download any detailed Ebook, or subscribe to your emails.
- Consider the number of people who are supporting your organisation or cause. You should track who provides monetary support or back your cause, or spread a world about your campaign.
Sentiment
Engagement is important but sentiment analysis is also necessary. If the engagement you get on your social media campaign isn’t generating conversions, then it’s of no use. On the other hand, the sentiment is an important metric that let’s you know how your organization is perceived and how positively people see you.
We are talking about your online reputation here. Make sure you have every alert about your brand mentions on social media. Be prompt in responding to queries about your cause. This way, you can improve, focus on your cause, and mitigate any negative sentiments.
Important Note
When you are measuring the impact of your social media campaign, you shouldn’t get caught up in the followers. A lot of marketers do that and get excited about the rising number of followers and fans. However, a great number of followers pave the way for greater reach, but it should not be your goal. Always draw a comparison between your follower growth and increased conversions. Remember a follower’s growth without ROI is not of much significance in the era where people want to see results.
How Mentionlytics Can Help in Social Media Monitoring?
As a nonprofit organization, it could be challenging to track social media activities. Things can turn messy in case people tend to question your agenda. To keep things better aligned with your image, you consistently need social media monitoring. It will help you track your audience’s behavior, preferences, sentiments, competitors, and engagement.
Taking notice of your needs we recommend you invest in good social media monitoring tools. One such tool is Mentionlytics. Once you start gathering the necessary insights, you can use it to identify major trends and strategize your social media campaign accordingly.
It gives you access to important mentioning insights that establish a connection with the right influencers for your nonprofit organization. This way, you can amplify your message in the right way and manage the reputation and revenue needs to run the cause.
You can easily get to know your competitors, products, and other important elements. It gives you a clear picture of what’s on people’s minds with brand mentions. It also offers complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.
Join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your cause with Mentionlytics. Prevent a reputation crisis before it harms your nonprofit organization.
Are you ready to explore excellent marketing opportunities with us? Get started with a free version here!
Originally posted on Mentionlytics :
https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/benefits-of-social-media-monitoring-for-nonprofit-organizations
