social media’s re-institution of two-way communication: a content analysis of the use and pervasiveness of today’s technology by the third sector

This article is a content analysis of the use of the top three social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by 100 of the 627 top nonprofit organizations in the United States listed by Charitywatch.org. The purpose of this research is to generate much-needed knowledge in this field by providing empirical data to the nonprofit sector on the use of social media in the nonprofit sector. Previously, such analysis did not exist for organizations operating within the United States, and, thus, many organizational leaders may be hesitant to allocate resources and funding to such efforts. The 100 websites were coded with an inter-coder reliability rate of 93%. Results demonstrate that there is a statistically significant, positive correlation between the number of social media websites linked to and the number of individual site subscribers. Websites were also coded for social media link ‘viewability,’ and this was measured against social media site popularity to test if link placement could influence social media following. Results indicate that the more clicks a user must perform to reach a social media page, the lower the site following would likely be. Results also revealed that the type of organization did not have a significant effect on whether audience members would be more involved with social media efforts or not. These trends can be used as evidence that the time spent in managing social media sites, even at the nonprofit level, can have a positive impact on an organization’s ability to reach its target population.