Slides from presentation at ANSER/ARES Conference, Brock University, St Catharines, ON, May 30, 2014. ABSTRACT: Social media offer an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. Yet the social media era also ushers in an increasingly “noisy” information environment that renders it more difficult for any given organization to make its voice heard. How then can an organization gain attention on social media? We address this question by building and testing a model of the effectiveness of the Twitter use of advocacy organizations. Using number of retweets and number of favorites as proxies of attention, we test our hypotheses with a 12-month panel dataset that collapses by month and organization the 219,915 tweets sent by 145 organizations in 2013. We find that attention is strongly associated with the size of an organization’s network, its frequency of speech, and the number of conversations it joins. We also find a seemingly contradictory relationship between different measures of attention and an organization’s targeting and connecting strategy. For full copy of paper please contact the authors at http://social-metrics.org

1. SpeakingSpeaking andand being heardbeing heard::
how advocacy organizationS gainhow advocacy organizationS gain
attention in the Social media worldattention in the Social media world
Chao Guo
University of
Pennsylvania
Gregory D. Saxton
University at Buffalo
May 30, 2014

2. Causal Framework

3. Data and Method
 Our sample comprises 145 “Civil Rights
and Advocacy” organizations rated by
Charity Navigator in 2011.
 We test our hypotheses with a 12-month
panel dataset—this organization-month
level dataset collapses by month and
organization the 219,915 tweets that were
sent by the 145 organizations over the
entire 12 months of 2013.

4. # of Tweets sent each month by the AARP Foundation

5. Findings:
Who Gets Attention?
 Size of the network matters
 The average number of followers for the 250 tweets with no retweets:
5,160
 The average number of followers for the 250 tweets with the most
retweets: 63,279
 A small # of followers (then the amount you tweet does not matter)
 Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)
 <900 followers, 4 friends, 0 retweets.

6. Findings (cont’d):
Who Gets Attention?
 Volume (or frequency) of speech matters
 Speaking – Show your presence.
 A lot of LGBT messages, e.g., gay marriage, GLAAD, The
Trevor Project, etc.

7. Findings (cont’d):
Who Gets Attention?
 Targeting & connecting strategy matters:
 Targeting
 Public Reply Messages
 e.g., “@joeymygod Thanks for the RT!”
 Connecting – build alliances.
 Retweeting other people’s messages.
 Hashtags (#anser2014) – connecting to topics
 URLs (hyperlinks)
 User mentions

8. Findings (cont’d):
Who Gets Attention?
 Visual content matters:
 Photos
 Link to photos
 Link to videos

9. Expected Number of Retweets Received at Various Levels of Tweeting,
Retweeting, and Tagging Activity