News on Social Media and Membership Marketing

As we continue compiling the data for the 2012 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report for our upcoming release, I thought that I would share some trends that we are seeing related to social media. The data represents responses from nearly 700 unique associations.

The data suggests to me that there has been a nearly complete adoption by associations of the official use of at least some social media tools. Here are some interesting findings that I have noted.

• The top social media networks officially used for association membership are: Facebook 86%, Twitter 78%, LinkedIn (Public) 55%, YouTube 55%, and LinkedIn (Private) 29%.

• Associations have increased their official use of Twitter: 66% in 2010, 71% in 2011, and now 78% in 2012.

• Associations have increased their official use of YouTube: 35% in 2010, 45% in 2011, and now 53% in 2012.

• 11% of associations are now officially using Google+.

• Associations with more than 20,000 members are much more likely to use social media, 96% use Facebook, 90% use Twitter, and 70% use YouTube.

• 31% of associations with more than 20,000 members have a private social network.

• Only 2% of the 685 responding associations do not officially do any social networking, down from 8% in 2010 and 6% in 2011.

The question that we asked from which I drew most of this data was, “Which social media does your association officially use?” We are cross tabulating these responses against previous years’ data, the number of members, budget size, industry, and key membership statistics like new members, renewal rates, and overall membership growth.