Tapping into your social graph

Social Impact is attending Social Media Week in New York. We'll be sharing some insights from this conference here on this blog.

For much of the last decade, foundations and nonprofits (like the rest of the online community) spent a lot of time thinking about search engine optimization – and for good reason. After all, a significant share of traffic to their sites comes from Google organic searches.

Now it’s time to think about social graph optimization as well. A social graph is the online representation of our relationships and behaviors on the social Web. The idea here is to take stock of the fans of your social media channels and use the information about their common interests to increase your visibility in that space. 

As you know, friends of your supporters/donors are more likely than the rest of the general public to become supporters/donors themselves. In order to motivate your fans to tell their own friends about the great work you’re doing, it’s important to get to know them. As for the data itself, there’s plenty of it. In fact, according to several Social Media Week panelists today, there was more recorded data in 2009 than in the entire history of humankind.

Conference attendees heard today from Mark Ghuneim, founder of Trendrr, which is one of the services collecting social graph data – but in fact there are many other options depending on your needs. As always, let us know if we can help you in this area.