Both for-profit and non-profit businesses that consider using social media are confronted by three questions. Answering each of these questions is critical to exploring whether the use of social media will bring a net benefit to your organization.

1. How do you decide if social media is right for reaching your audience?
This decision largely depends on whether and how your constituency uses social media. You also want to find out if social media interactions have the power to influence your constituency’s behavior (such as purchase or donation decisions). To learn this, you can conduct an online survey of your constituency. In addition, a recently released Pew Internet report sheds new light on the impact of social media—including who is using each major social media site, and why.

The picture of how to use social media effectively is becoming increasingly clear, impacting the ability of both non-profits and for-profits to make educated decisions on using social media effectively for business.

2. If you do use social media, how will you know whether it is generating results?
Therese Grohman at Event 360 (a fundraising event consulting firm) has recently posted a good reflection on how to track the effectiveness of social media, in terms of what should be measured. A separate post from the same firm discusses a few of the tools available for social media automation and tracking.

Many people claim that tracking the effectiveness of social media is difficult. I don’t see it that way. The effectiveness of social media can be tracked in ways very similar to typical web analytics: simply use the right tools to ascertain whether your activity results in action. It is more a matter of discipline than capability.

One thing to be aware of is what I call “social location shift”. This is what occurs when a portion of your constituents moves from one location (such as your existing website) to a newly introduced location (such as your Facebook page). This can result in initially promising results from social media analytics, only to find that the total net effect is the same. Social media success depends on the ability to expand audiences and/or create more dynamic relationships. (In my reading about social media, “social location shift” hasn’t been much discussed; hence, my emphasis on it here.)

3. Do we have the internal capability/personality to use social media?
The answer to this question depends to a large extent on current use of social media by your staff for personal or professional purposes. If it is something that your people feel drawn to, you are more likely to be able to harness existing tendencies.

However, it may be possible to make effective use of social media even if your current team doesn’t naturally orient in that direction. The ability to do this effectively is dependent on reducing social media participation to a process with expected results. This is true of marketing activity in general—though it does require a particular skill set, there are many tasks that can be performed by “non-marketing staff” if the process is understood and the benefit is explained.

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