How to Evaluate Social Media Use for Nonprofits Part I

Various organizations use social media to help with their products and services. Nonprofit organizations especially tend to rely on social media since they are for free. When they use social media, they will wonder about the same question: how well does the organization use social media.
The following are ten social media metrics and how to evaluate social media use with these metrics.
First of all, nonprofits need to keep an eye on their website traffic. You may wonder why you spend a lot of efforts on designing the website and updating everything, yet you get few responses. That's when you will need to track your website's traffic logs and visitors from month to month. You will need to see the change as you branch out to a larger and larger community.

Another important way to evaluate social media use is blog traffic. Nonprofits may find it hard to update blogs on a regular basis, yet this turns out to be a tremendous help to the organization.Blogging may have been a missing piece in most nonprofits' social media strategy package. The nonprofit I work for---InterAct---keeps blogs on community websites like ShareTriangle, MyNC, and GOLO. InterAct was very specific about what web hosts they chose to start blogs. ShareTriangle, MyNC and GOLO are basically the three major event and information sharing community websites that everyone can post blogs and respond to one. This gives some leeway to nonprofits in terms of sharing their events and fundraiser schedules, educating the public about a social issue, and asking for support from local communities. Also, monitoring blog traffic will be necessary in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a blog. To simply put, you may not only count how many replies you get for each blog post, but also how much traffic your blog generate for your official website.

The last one in this post is e-letter tactics. E-letter will help people who are captive audience become voluntary. In other words, people are 'forced' to read your e-letter and get the information, and if they are interested, they will dig more. That's how e-letter works to help promote website traffic, webinar registration, event participation, and even donations.
Content of e-letter is important. Nowadays people are fed up with sales spams, so your e-letter must be personal relevant. If your audience are women with younger children, then your organization e-letter may want to touch several topics like parenting, early schooling, etc. They will attract the audience and thus convince them that your organization will be of some help.
If nonprofits manage this tool well, they will likely see more and more people signing up for their e-letters.