The Social Media Usage of America’s Largest Nonprofits

Guest Post written by Brick Factory Project

It’s no secret that nonprofits rely on social media to draw in supporters and get their message out there. As a company that works with nonprofits’ social media strategy, we wanted to research large nonprofits’ social media usage trends and effectiveness rates to use as benchmarks for our clients. However, we didn’t find as much research on these niche users as we hoped we would. Being the problem-solvers that we are, we decided to conduct our own study and report on our results.

This culminated into Brick Factory’s “The Social Media Usage of America’s Largest Nonprofits.” This study examines how the largest nonprofit organizations in the United States are using three major social networking sites: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Three of the key points nonprofits should takeaway are: engagement is 10 times higher on Instagram than on Facebook, videos get twice as many shares than any other type of post on Twitter, and weekend posts perform better than weekday posts on Facebook.

Have we piqued your interest yet? If so, we’re about to help you kick your nonprofits’ social media presence into high gear. If you want to learn more, download the full study at https://www.thebrickfactory.com/report/nonprofit-social-media.

Engagement is 11 times higher on Instagram than on Facebook.

The average nonprofit has many more followers on Facebook than they do on Instagram. In order to give everyone a fair playing field, we normalized the data by looking at engagement if each nonprofit had 100,000 followers on each network. What we found was interesting, but not surprising.

An average nonprofits’ Instagram post got more than 11 times the likes of the average Facebook post.

We’ve also discovered that nonprofits are unlikely to take advantage of this trend. From our research, nonprofits are more likely to have a Facebook account than an Instagram account.

Videos get twice as many shares than any other type of post on Twitter.

When it comes to Twitter, videos are more likely to be shared than any other type of post, with a median of 16 shares per post. Directly following Twitter videos, photos and links were the second and third most likely type of post users would share, at a median of 7 shares per post. The least likely Twitter post type that users would share were text posts with a median of 2 shares per post.

Despite the evidence that videos are most likely to be shared on Twitter than any other post type, only 3.6% of a nonprofits’ Twitter posts are videos.

Weekend posts perform better than weekday posts on Facebook.

Facebook posts had higher levels of reactions and engagement when posted on the weekend compare to weekday postings. The best day on the weekend to post on Facebook are Sunday, with a median of 206 likes, 40 shares, and 5 comments.

Compare that to Wednesday, the worst day to post to Facebook. Wednesday saw a median of 138 likes, 27 shares, and 4 comments.

Even though our clients are less likely to post on the weekend, doing so may increase their engagement levels by 29%.