How nonprofits choose to follow on Twitter varies widely. Some nonprofits only follow a small of amount of Twitterers, others follow hundreds or thousands, and a few follow more (sometimes a lot more) than they are being followed themselves. However, from browsing more than 80,000 nonprofits on Twitter over the last three years, the vast majority of nonprofits follow...
At about the time I quit working for the day (6pm in Missouri, USA), nonprofits in New Zealand, Australia, and Asia are coming online for another work day. Then, over the next 12 hours, on comes nonprofits in India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. It’s amazing what happens on Twitter during our off hours and while we are...
Finding your Twitter voice is an accomplishment only earned through a process of trial and error and conscious experimentation. Even the best social media managers often go through an initial period of puzzlement and frustration as they try to figure out how Twitter works and what to tweet. That said, the nonprofits below have discovered a nice balance of...
Nonprofits pioneered social media. They were on Myspace and organizing via Facebook Groups years before corporate brands, higher education, and broadcast and print media. That said, I am starting to worry a little bit that nonprofits are falling behind on mobile communications and missing out on some exceptional opportunities to tell their nonprofit’s story to the mobile masses. One of the...
It took 2 years, 10 months, and 50,000 clicks of a mouse, but yesterday @NonprofitOrgs followed its 50,000th nonprofit on Twitter! I start each morning browsing those that followed @NonprofitOrgs the day and night before, and follow those that are nonprofits and nonprofit staff in return. There a handful of nonprofit service providers in there too. That said, I’ve...
Whether it is better and more productive to Retweet old-school style or with just one-click using Twitter’s Retweet function is a question I have been asking myself for months now, and the truth is I just don’t know the answer yet. Both methods have their pros and cons, and without asking my followers, it’s hard to say with conviction...
An online database of Twitter Apps called oneforty currently lists almost 2,900 third-party Twitter Apps. While some nonprofits have been early adopters of Twitter Apps, the vast majority are not. They may not even know the tools exist. Once you start browsing around and experimenting, you’ll quickly come to realize that there are a phenominal number of free Twitter...
Thousands of nonprofits haven’t logged into their MySpace profiles in months, or even a year or more. The majority have moved on to Facebook and Twitter. That said, MySpace is not dead. Traffic has definitely sloooowed, but the site still has 57 million monthly visitors in the United States (as of December 2009). They just don’t tend to be...
“A survey of 200 charity and foundation professionals revealed that nonprofits are finding it difficult to determine how valuable social media tools are for their organizations. Seventy-nine percent said they hadn’t found ways to do so.” – Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 12, 2009 For those 79% of nonprofits out there, I have listed 10 social media metrics below that...
Recent studies have revealed that the vast majority of nonprofits do not know how to measure ROI (Return on Investment) from utilizing social media. Below are 5 simple, low-cost ways nonprofits can measure ROI with a minimal time investment of only a couple of hours a month. 1. Monitor your website traffic. During the Era of Web 1.0, nonprofits...
Twitter’s new Lists are a great way to organize your followers, and with a little intention and a dose of good will, Twitter Lists can also be used to promote your favorite nonprofits and the causes you care about. Here’s how: 1) Create a “Favorite Nonprofits” List Lists can say a lot about your character and what’s important to...
If used correctly, #hashtags can be very useful to nonprofits on Twitter. Hashtags allow your organization to participate and inspire conversations (and in the process get new followers) and organize the Twitterverse around campaigns (#climatechange) and events (#openwebawards). The problem is that there so many hashtags floating around on Twitter, that’s it tough to keep track of which hashtags...
Last week I asked the followers of @NonprofitOrgs to nominate their favorite nonprofit bloggers. The list below is the result of that “Tweet Out”. Some on the list are very known in the nonprofit sector, and others are completely under the radar and providing some very valuable resources to the nonprofit sector. This time around I limited the list...