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Why Social Listening Matters For Nonprofits

Loop Creative

by Tanya Sloan

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Social media is a cost effective way for nonprofits to get their message out and engage with their supporters. A key component in an effective social media strategy is social listening (monitoring).

Social listening helps you understand the needs of your target audience, including what they think about your organization, who they interact with, what their interests are, and what they want to hear. All of this information can help improve your social media use and strategy.

Social media listening allows nonprofits to:

.01

Connect with supporters by interacting with them. Respond to their questions, make comments, share their content that is relevant to your organization.

.02

Learn what content works best for your target audience on specific social media channels for communication

.03

Locate and connect with influencers who believe in your mission and can help promote your messages.

.04

Monitor your partners. Share their content, interact with them on their social channels. Are they sharing your content?

.05

Find out what inspires people to donate or volunteer.

Strategies for social listening:

Follow relevant hashtags on Instagram. This allows you to see what your audience is interested in and how they’re interacting with other similar brands and organizations. 

  1. Google Alerts sends email updates of the topics that you choose. You will be notified of any news or blogs that mention your topic. Or you can use news.google.com to search for your organization using keywords.

  2. Receiving alerts about your organization in real time means you can see exactly what is being said about you and where. Mention offers a great free option.

  3. By seeing what sites your target audience is visiting and what search terms they’re looking up, it puts you into a better position to provide value to the people you serve. Google Trends gives you insights into the traffic and search trends in your cause area.

  4. Tweet Deck run by Twitter lets you monitor live feeds across the platform.

Social media and social listening play an important role in your overall marketing strategy. Consider how improving your social listening skills can improve your ability to engage with your supporters and further your reach and mission!

Have questions? Let’s chat!