5 of the best ways to measure your nonprofit’s social influence

Nonprofit fundraising and social media definitely go hand in hand and while there are those within the industry that feel that the sector has fallen behind others in embracing social media it doesn’t have to be that way. We frequently write about some of the best tips to use social media to encourage donor engagement and spur new audiences and today we’ll look at some of the best ways to measure your audience and in turn your social media success.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of using social media is that you can experiment with strategies on a continual basis and while I encourage doing so, it is vital that you also take the time to benchmark and measure the results of your efforts. I’ve written in the past about the deep value provided by Facebook Insights as one example, today we’ll touch on five other key ways you can measure your social influence.

SEMRush: How is your site truly being found?

Link: http://www.semrush.com

Price: Free limited access, full services from $69.95/month

Overview: Keyword traffic typically accounts for a huge percentage of the visitors that will be seeing your site for the first time, but do you have a good understanding of how people actually find your organization versus how you hope that they do? If you’re a larger organization chances are you already compile a certain amount of SEO tracking information for traffic sourcing, keyword ranking and such but if you don’t have the time, staff or expertise then SEMRush can eliminate much of the guesswork. Just enter the url of your site into the search field and even the basic version of SEMRush will provide a list of the keywords that you rank highest for. The advanced versions allow you to drill much deeper down into the data and can provide huge benefits when considering your keyword strategies or even social media hashtags.

Klout: A competitive scoring system to track social media progress

Link: http://klout.com/

Price: Free

Overview: Klout is fun to use, at times somewhat arbitrary but an easy to use tracker/rating system for your social media influence. The metrics behind the tool are another one of those ‘secret recipes’ but essentially your overall influence score is generated for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The tool has improved substantially over the years and considers who your followers are, your level of likes, retweets, number of followers and associated data. You can explore the data for hours if you like but at the very least it’s an easy and great way to measure your social media progress and see how changes you make impact that score. Sometimes you don’t want to delve through columns of numbers and Klout allows you to acquire a great snapshot of what’s working well.

Bitly: Twitter specialists will love the tracking

Link: https://bitly.com/

Price: Free

Overview: If you’re very active on Twitter chances are you already use a url-shortener for your posts and if not you’ll want to start today. Bit.ly (and other shorteners) allows you to compress your links to just a few characters allowing more space in the limited length world of Twitter for your own content and hashtags which is invaluable. However Bit.ly does far more than that and allows you to track the performance of every tweet in detail with full click details. The free version is all you’ll require.

Feedburner: How well are your feeds being digested?

Link: http://feedburner.google.com/

Price: Free

Overview: Since being purchased by Google, Feedburner has become the most efficient way to circulate your feeds to your audience. You may overlook just how large a slice of your audience access your content via feeds – to either your entire site (seeking changes) or your blog updates. Feedburner allows you to easily track your average number of subscribers, reach, popular feed items (recently and all time) and much more. Again I love this tool because the data is concrete and it won’t eat up much of your time.

Simply Measured – The best overall selection of reporting, ideal for large campaigns

Link: http://simplymeasured.com/

Price: An assortment of free reports, pricing from $500/month

Overview: For truly large organizations I’d recommend Simply Measured just for the wealth of reporting options available. It is expensive but if you are running a large social campaign and want to get to the root of your data the choices available here for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest are the most comprehensive I’ve seen and are all housed in one place. They provide a set of free reporting tools so that you can test-drive them first and you’ll see why I recommend it.

I hope that  some of these are new to you and you have opportunity to experiment with them to benefit your nonprofit your nonprofit social media marketing. Let me know how you get on and if you have questions please let me know.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services