At this point, it’s not exactly a revelation to say that Facebook is a household name. But with more than 300 social networking platforms out there and recent claims that its popularity is floundering, is Facebook still leading the pack?
Absolutely.
As of last September, Facebook had 1.19 billion active users each month. That’s 18% more active users than it had in September 2012. So Facebook usage is clearly continuing to grow.
As for market share, Facebook hasn’t wavered. While Twitter and Pinterest visits ebb and flow, Facebook still claims about 60% of the social media market.
The secret of Facebook’s success is actually not a secret at all. Facebook is so widely used thanks to the social graph, a concept that Mark Zuckerberg described at a developer conference back in 2007. In his words, the social graph is “the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together.”
So every time an alum or donor “likes” one of your posts on Facebook, it becomes an edge, a connection point between them and your school. The resulting map of a user’s edges creates more of a web than a traditional graph, making “social graph” a bit of a misnomer.
Visualization of Facebook Social Graph
But whatever the shape, Facebook has mapped out the social graph around people and their relationships, which is important because people—many of whom are your alums and donors—shape how information moves through their connections. They are increasingly discovering information through the people and things they care about on Facebook. Like their alma maters.
This flow of social information has already had profound effects on the for-profit sector and can be equally game-changing for nonprofit fundraising through Social Donor Management. Currently, two key factors prevent non-profits from achieving their goals: out-of-date data and a technology gap of about 5-10 years (compared to for-profits). Social Donor Management addresses these fundamental challenges by starting with data from Facebook’s pervasive social graph to lay a foundation for delivering information that’s 25x better than the information in your legacy donor CRM.
Click here to learn more about Social Donor Management and how it can increase your participation rates, identify your major donor prospects, and improve your stewardship.
