Understanding Understanding

A few weeks ago, I told you about the 2009 eNonprofits Benchmarks Study, which allows you to compare the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns to that of other nonprofits. Today, M+R released its 2010 Nonprofit Social Media Benchmarks Study, reporting the effectiveness of nonprofits’ Facebook and Twitter efforts. In a conference call today, they discussed some of the highlights.

Staff Time

Nonprofits that use Facebook and Twitter devote on average 5 to 6 staff hours per week on social networking and post to those services at least daily:

• Facebook: 6 times per week
• Twitter: 4 times per day

Fan / Follower Growth Rate

Because each medium is at a different stage in its maturity, the growth rate of fans / followers / e-mail subscribers varies:

• Facebook: 3.75% growth per month
• Twitter: 9% growth per month
• E-mail: 1.4% growth per month

Meanwhile, organizations are seeing churn rates of

• Facebook: 2% per month
• E-mail: 1% per month

(Corresponding numbers for Twitter were not available.)

Interestingly, the number of posts a nonprofit makes have a mixed effect on the number of fans:

• More posts = more new fans / followers
• More posts = more fans / followers leaving

Fan Action

The study says Facebook fans take 2.5 actions (including simple thumbs ups) for every post a organization makes to its page — which is around 3 times the activity seen from e-mail. When the page post is by a fan, the number of resulting fan actions increases to 4 actions per fan. (Corresponding numbers for Twitter were not available.)

You can download the complete report, for free.

(This post originally appeared on Future:Media:Change January 25, 2010.)