To Small Nonprofits on the Social Web: 5,000 is the Magic Number!
I wanted to give some encouragement to all the small and medium-sized nonprofits out there on the Social Web that tweet, share and post regularly with the hope of growing their communities and inspiring social good – some feedback I received last week from Line Storgaard-Conley, Director of Digital and Social Media Strategy at Safe Kids Worldwide:
Remember back when you came to present at our conference in 2008 and told everyone that 5,000 fans was the magic number – that once we got to that number our Facebook Page would take on a life of its own? We worked so hard to get to 5,000 and then we took off! We engaged, asked questions, held competitions, discovered advertising and had a great time teaching the world about our cause and how to keep kids safe. And today we hit 100,000 likes/fans. Yeah! So thanks for your great advice back then and the fantastic advice you still provide through your awesome blog.
Blush. And it’s true. 5,000 is the magic number. I wrote about it in Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits:
Communities begin to grow exponentially when they reach 5,000 members. I’ve observed this phenomenon on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, and Foursquare. From there on out, the larger your community gets, the faster it grows. Large national and international nonprofits have little problem reaching this benchmark, but small and some medium-size nonprofits will. Some will say that the number of likes or followers that you have doesn’t matter, but it does. The larger your communities, the higher your ROI. Work toward that goal of five thousand. It may take a year or two, but if you follow the best practices in this book, you will reach that magic number.
All that said, if you have found yourself frustrated because your communities are growing slowly, but you know you are posting good content, just know that it’s always the slowest in the beginning. There is absolutely a math to social media and once you hit that 5,000 mark, you’ll begin experience a faster pace of growth. 🙂
Related Link:
Safe Kids Worldwide Facebook Page
Social Media and Mobile Technology Webinars for Nonprofits
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Nonprofit Tech 2.0 Blog :: A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits 
Thanks for this encouraging (yet discouraging!) information. Breaking 5,000 is not easy for a small church with a big mission!
Confused: Went to the FB page for Safe Kinds and see 1,035 “likes” – how is the 5,000? Where to see what above refers to please? ls/ccac
The link is in the blog post above… 103,000 Fans: http://www.facebook.com/SafeKidsUSA
Used an older link to FB below perhaps, thanks for update and answer. Cheers, ls/ccac
Of course. 🙂
For the Large Nonprofits: Have you guys come across any data the shows a ceiling for when pages begin to become ineffective or stagnant due to size?
Thanks for the encouragement it is very much needed.
I wonder what really makes this really a magic number? Does something change as far as ranking when you reach 5000 likes? I’d be interested to know.
I really think it is an undiscovered law of math… on the Social Web. The math of virality and social networking. 🙂
Reblogged this on netvolunteer.
Congratulations!
But why is 5,000 the magic number?
Is it a proxy indicator for another set of outcomes related to the mission of the organization?
What did 5,000 likes accomplish for your organization? More money? More volunteers? More partnerships?
What tangible outcomes can you report that suggest the effort to get to 5,000 is worth the incredible investment of time and money?
It’s simply math. 🙂
The higher your numbers… the higher your traffic… the higher your email newsletter subscribers… the more online donations, volunteers, event attendees, etc. My book explains it in 268 pages… too much for a comment. 🙂
Our team is glad for this reassurance. We’ve been working hard to have interesting content and mix different mediums to get people involved….but the numbers have been climbing….slowly. We have been taking a lot of the advice given through this blog and your webinars so we know that soon and very soon we will have that 5,000 and more!
As others discover the original blogpost – it shows how replying and exchange online can continue, even among diverse strangers, and hopefully boost followers, yet of course nonprofittech2.0 knows this well :-). We’d like to add that one reaches thousands more, potentially, if you caption (subtitle) all your media online (videos of any sort, even audio events). Cheers, Lauren for http://ccacaptioning.org is our web; social media: http://www.linkedin.com/company/collaborative-for-communication-access-via-captioning-ccac- and also http://www.facebook.com/pages/Collaborative-for-Communication-via-Captioning-CCAC/416340418411010?ref=hl