An Early Study of Nonprofit Organizations' Usage of Twitter

 

This week, as I read the article, "Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media." (Lovejoy, K. & Saxton, G.D., 2012), I found myself mentally adding the names of more platforms and social media tools to all the lists that were mentioned in the article.  Lists of what was considered at the time of the article to be new or commons means of communicating within organizations and in community building practices.  Sometimes, it is simply amazing how each passing year brings more options to our interpersonal and social media communication toolboxes.

Speaking of amazing, this article was loaded with amazing facts and data.  For example, the sample of 100 top nonprofit organizations they started out with was narrowed down to 73 when they sorted out which ones had a Twitter account.  I was surprised to discover that out of those 73 nonprofit organizations only 58 of them had a link somewhere on their website for their Twitter account.  When the article mentioned an account was considered to be active when there were at least 3 tweets per week and only 59 out of the 73 met that criteria, I was really surprised and thought to myself, "that would not fly in today's social media microblogging expectations." (pun intended)

Studying and coding thousands of tweets could not have been an easy task, but the information that was derived from their efforts was an important contribution to understanding the usage of Twitter by these nonprofit organizations.  The authors acknowledged that nonprofits have financial and technological barriers to adopting a social media presence, and yet, those nonprofits were seen as more likely having that presence than smaller organizations.  I believe the functions and the categories the authors discovered from their tweet study were more interesting because of their sample being made up of only large nonprofit organizations.

The three main functions for usage of a Twitter account by nonprofit organizations were labeled as:     1) Information 2) Community and 3) Action.  The authors described in perfect detail what each of these functions entails and how they differ from each other.  Under the label of each of these functions, sub-categories were created for the purpose of coding each tweet. The result was a total of twelve sub-categories: four under the Community function, seven under the Action function and just information under the Information function.  After sorting out the tweets with these categories, each organization was examined to see where their tweets landed on the coding charts.  The majority of the organizations leaned heavily on Information tweets (47), with Community Building tweets being the top type of tweets for 8 of the organizations and there being 3 nonprofit organizations focusing the majority of their tweets on Action (mobilizing and promoting) tweets.  

As I read the conclusion of this article, I found myself wondering if the function categories listed in the study have evolved into more categories and subcategories now in 2025 just based on the overall evolution of the presence of social media in organizational communication. Especially as more nonprofit organizations have realized the importance of using social media tools to communicate information, build a community of followers and organize action around the mission of the nonprofit organization.  I would be so interested to see how the same organizations that were in this study have changed their tweeting, or microblogging on another platform if they have left Twitter, since 2012.