Social Media Management

• Author: Sarah P. Maxwell,Julia L. Carboni
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21232
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Date: 01 December 2016

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N M  L, vol. 27, no. 2, Winter 2016 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21232

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

Correspondence to: Sarah P. Maxwell, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 West Campbell Ave, Public and Nonprofi t

Management Department, Richardson, Texas, 75080.

Social Media Management

EXPLORING FACEBOOK ENGAGEMENT

AMONG HIGH-ASSET FOUNDATIONS

Sarah P. Maxwell ,1 Julia L. Carboni 2

1 University of Texas, Dallas , 2 Syracuse University

Do foundations effectively use social media to engage stakeholders? Do usage and engage-

ment vary by foundation type? This article has been written to stimulate discussion and

research about social media use and user engagement by foundations beyond measuring

social media presence. We analyzed Facebook usage and stakeholder engagement for three

types of foundations: community, corporate, and independent grant-making foundations.

We found that although community foundations are more likely to have a social media

presence, corporate and independent foundations are more likely to use Facebook and to

effectively engage stakeholders. Findings illuminate the need to understand social media

usage and engagement in addition to presence. We discuss potential benefits of social media

use and provide practical communication management recommendations for nonprofit

practitioners.

Keywords: social media , foundations , stakeholder engagement , Facebook ,

communications

SOCIAL MEDIA USE by the nonprofit sector has exploded in recent years. Social media (for

example, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn) are online platforms that promote

dynamic, real-time communication among many actors (Barker et al. 2013 ; Lovejoy and Sax-

ton 2012 ). Though there are hundreds of millions of visitors to social media sites each month,

research on the use, functions, and purposes of social media as a communication strategy has

lagged (Guo and Saxton 2014 ; Treem and Leonardi 2012 ). Existing social media scholarship

tends to be limited to organizational use of social media rather than stakeholder engagement

or interaction with site visitors.

Social media are a potentially useful strategic communications tools that nonprofit organi-

zations can use to reach multiple stakeholders simultaneously in real time without incur-

ring significant costs associated with traditional forms of communications. Recent studies

demonstrate that social media are generally useful for creating dialogue, building commu-

nities, and disseminating advocacy messages (Bortree and Seltzer 2009 ; Briones et al. 2011 ;

Greenberg and MacAulay 2009 ; Guo and Saxton 2014 ; Lovejoy and Saxton 2012 ; Waters