A study of non-profit social media engagement
Abstract
As more nonprofit organizations increase their usage of social media to reach new audiences, audience research is needed to help practitioners formulate strategic communications plans that reach the goals of the organization. Too often nonprofit communicators drive top-down communication strategies using social media that have very little audience engagement. This study looked at the user interactions with nonprofit organizations on Facebook and attempted to categorize user-generated content based on the AEIO model (attention, emotion, information, opinion). The goal of this study was to determine the most common types of interaction Facebook users have with nonprofit organizations as well as the types of content users create to initiate engagement with a nonprofit organization via Facebook. This study found that the most common type of engagement with a nonprofit organization was a user reacting (i.e., using Facebook's like, love, anger, or wow reactions) to an organization's post, with sharing an organization's post a distant second, followed by commenting on the organization's post and a user creating their own message. To the extent they existed, messages seeking the attention of the users' friends to highlight the users' involvement with the organization were the most common overall user-generated content.
Degree
M.A.
Thesis Department
Rights
OpenAccess.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.