Happy Social Media Week

Did you even know that it’s Social Media Week? Well, it is and I am excited to celebrate this monumental advancement in technology. From keeping in touch with old friends to finding out what my favorite organizations are doing, I honestly can’t remember my life before Facebook.

So what exactly is Social Media Week? Quite simply, it is a conference that takes place in 21 of the largest cities in the world to celebrate and share the global impact that social media is having cultural, economic, political and social change in developed and emerging markets. This event has more than 60,000 worldwide attendees with another half million who join either online or through other mobile connections.
This week of cyber-talk is particularly important for nonprofits for one simple reason: most of your donors are connected to the internet and the best way to reach donors is to meet them where they’re at. Just look at some of these statistics from JeffBullas.com:

1)      Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site

2)      More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices

3)      More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook

4)      30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month

5)      YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011)

6)      190 million average Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011)

7)      Twitter is handling 1.6 billion queries per day

8)      Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day

9)      Google+ has more than 25 million users

10)   Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)

Just imagine how much time and money it would cost in a direct mail campaign or cold call list to contact even 1,000 of these people! With social media you can type in a message, hit send ,and instantly hundreds of your donors can be contacted and the amount of re-posts or re-tweets are immeasurable.

Furthermore, this conference has some of the most brilliant minds in business who have combined marketing skills with technological advancements to create profits worldwide. I can’t even begin to grasp what knowledge and experience they have that can be applied to nonprofit fundraising.

So raise up your mug of lukewarm coffee and take a bite of a sugary pastry to welcome Social Media Week. It may not be Mardi Gras, but for the guy in the cubicle next to you it may just be the next best thing.
Tune in tomorrow to learn how Facebook can impact your online fundraising numbers…

In this series:

Happy Social Media Week – http://bit.ly/yKlkNr

Woman Uses Fundly and Facebook to Help Fulfill Stranger’s Last Wish –http://bit.ly/wluGiv

Twitter vs. Facebook: To Tweet or Not to Tweet – http://bit.ly/ADdqwn

Implementing an Online Fundraising Plan for Beginners – http://bit.ly/x5BymH

Starting Your Own Blog – http://bit.ly/yxR2kG