Social Media and the Social Good: How Nonprofits Use Facebook to Communicate with the Public

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the 100 largest US nonprofits utilize Facebook for stakeholder engagement, identifying key content categories and demonstrating social media's role in fostering new public interaction paradigms.

Contribution

The study introduces a classification scheme for nonprofit Facebook use and highlights the shift towards dialogic and community-building engagement over traditional informational approaches.

Findings

Five primary Facebook status categories identified

Nonprofits excel in community and dialogic engagement

Social media fosters new paradigms of public interaction

Abstract

In this study, we examine the social networking practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. More specifically, we develop a comprehensive classification scheme to delineate these organizations' use of Facebook as a stakeholder engagement tool. We find that there are 5 primary categories of Facebook "statuses", which can be aggregated into three key dimensions - "information", "community", and "action". Our analysis reveals that, though the "informational" use of Facebook is still significant, nonprofit organizations are better at using Facebook to strategically engage their stakeholders via "dialogic" and "community-building" practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media seems to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement.