Too many nonprofits make the mistake of thinking social media is only about fundraising or sharing information, like a newspaper or monthly newsletter.
But studies have shown that the more your social media activities act like a relationship, the better your “action rate”. And in social media benchmarking, action rate is king.
No one ever had a long term relationship via Twitter. Or facebook. Or texting. Not one that was meaningful anyway. It’s the same for your organizations relationships with its community of supporters. Social media is just one of many ways to engage and build. The action rate of your fans or followers is where the relationship builds and takes off.
NTEN released a report in 2009 that revealed a monthly fan growth rate of 3.75 percent, for organizations with a facebook Page or Group.
That’s more than the growth rate for email lists.
At the same time, these orgs also showed a churn rate of 2 percent. And a click through of even less. And when texting was focused on fundraising, the unsubscribe rate was at its highest.
We are using this media wrong.
While we are doing a great job of getting people to ‘like’ us, we drop the ball when it comes to keeping them or motivating them to go to the next level in building a relationship with our organizations.
We need to see our fans and followers individually, just like we would our friends, and address them as such. We need to do more than share news, vids and pics, or worse only ask for money. We need to provide a reason to call to action and get them working on our behalf. How that is done will be different for everyone of us, but it should be the goal of all of our social media strategies.
Social media is more than a presence. It’s an organism, living and pulsing with interactive life.
It is about engaging, collaborating, empowering, authorizing, motivating, stimulating, challenging, supporting, validating, bonding, communicating, sharing, inspiring and gathering. It’s a relationship between you and “one user” at a time. Stay invested and keep the flow of interaction swirling.