Great Blog Post from Miratel Solutions, Inc.
We are constantly evaluating the most effective ways to use social media for nonprofit fundraising including the various platforms, how best to drive engagement, tips to increase your audience/reach and targeting your fundraising message. No matter what size your charity there will be advantages to developing a social media campaign for events, nonprofit fundraising, communication and overall awareness but one of the most time consuming elements and therefore largest challenges can be measuring your influence and trends.
If your organization is large enough to have full time staff devoted to social media management then pulling together proper analysis of data might not be a major issue as you evaluate Google Analytics, RSS Feeds, Blog Stats, Facebook Insights and Pinterest Analytics but it can rapidly become an obstacle to your primary goal of creating and sharing new content to help the online profile of your nonprofit. As I’ve written many times before it’s a very good thing to be experimental with social media, trying new things and adapting your approach can have giant benefits in helping spread public awareness of your organization. Some platforms will emerge as an excellent method of keeping existing supporters ‘in the know’ which might be your website, blog or Facebook page while other platforms provide a great source of building recognition and sourcing new followers/donors.
If you don’t realistically have the time or resources to compile, study and contrast the data from so many different sources there are a number of social media tracking tools on the market that essentially compile all of the most important information for you so that you can determine what’s working well at a glance and easily assess and measure the influence and impact of changes you make along with focusing in on which specific update generated a spike of activity. Some of these tools are completely free while others offer tiered monthly pricing usually after a free trial period. If you’re planning on devoting a lot of time to developing social media content for your charity but don’t have the available time and people to measure the effect of your work then these tools are definitely worth serious consideration.
Today I wanted to quickly share a few of the leading options currently available and in coming months I’ll be taking some for a test drive to share more information about these social media tracking tools.
HootSuite – HootSuite has been around for six years now and remains a very popular ‘all-in-one’ dashboard to track social media results. It allows you to monitor a selection of social networks from one single dashboard and create customized reports – choosing from a package of thirty settings. Best of all it now includes Facebook Insights and Google Analytics within that same dashboard.
Klout – I still recommend Klout as a good product to help you get introduced to social media tracking, despite remaining quirky in the presentation of some of the data it remains a good entry level (and free basic version) tool which provides useful data about how well you are networking on most of the major social media channels.
Trackur – One of the newer competitors in the market and it offers what looks to be a very robust choice of reporting options. I’ll be taking Trackur for a 10 day free trial test spin next month and will report back on my findings after that trial is over.
Sprout Social – Over the last year Sprout has become one of the most popular social media tracking tools and the listed options for analytics and study show why. It’s on my list of tools to give a trial to this summer and I’ll let you know what I think. If you’ve already tried it or currently use it please share your findings in the comments.
Unilyzer – Another tool that creates an aggregate social media score much like Klout. It helps you track which campaigns are working best and on which social networks. An easy to use graphics interface allows you to view the ratio of visitors who ‘stay’ with your social media platform which is really interesting.
