Doing Facebook Right

Last week I had the distinct pleasure to present to about 60 members of the nonprofit industry at the Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association monthly meeting. My presentation was about demystifying social media for nonprofits, and the discussion across the hour was a combination of questions, challenges and sharing of best practices.

In this week's blog and next week, I'm going to share my presentation, but today I'm starting with Facebook. From my perspective it might be misunderstood in some areas but extremely valuable in other areas.

Let's start with some data about Facebook and the other primary social channels used by nonprofits:

• 93 percent of marketers use social media for business.
• Facebook has 1.15 billion active users with 4.75 billion items posted daily.
• Twitter has 232 million active users with 500 million tweets a day.
• Instagram has 200 million active posters a month — estimated 75 million per day.
• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month.
• Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube — 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (but 80 percent of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S.).

Now, let's talk about some tough news. Recent data suggests that 53 percent of nonprofits are not measuring their social-media efforts, and 67 percent have no social-media strategy, policies or goals documented.

Yet, with so many nonprofits represented in Facebook, it is easy to see the big mistake: Many organizations rush to set up Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more and start using the tools — yet there is not strategy or even a set of goals for what they want from these channels. The tools/channels should flow from the strategy/social-media plan, not the other way around. In next week's post I'm going to go through the development of a plan and the key elements for measurement.