Social Media Capital for Nonprofits: How to Accumulate It, Convert It, and Spend It
Chao Guo and Gregory D. Saxton, writing for the winter 2016 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, discuss the advent of what was then a new kind of observable capital—social media capital:
Social media capital is a special form of social capital that is accumulated through an organization’s social media network. Nonprofits can look at it as being the key immediate outcome derived from their social media efforts, and it is a resource that can be converted or expended, like other resources, toward strategic organizational outcomes. To illustrate why and how social media capital is the linchpin of social media’s return on investment, we present a logic model for nonprofit organizations currently using, or planning to use, social media. Unless nonprofits understand the critical role of social media capital within this logic model—based on a plan that is well organized around strategic outcomes—then their social media efforts may essentially come to far less than might have been possible.
