AI for Nonprofits

Chapter 15.2Social Media Analysis

Based on insights from an interview with Robin Sukhadia.

If your nonprofit has been on social media for a while now, as most of us have, you may be wondering which topics, timing, days, hashtags, and post length delivered the best engagement. What content generates likes, comments, and shares most consistently? Before AI, it was difficult if not impossible to conduct real, detailed data analysis to figure out what worked and why. But now, it's quite simple to invite AI to review historic data and make important inferences, using data-driven metrics to optimize your investments in awareness building and communications moving forward. The good news is, this isn't rocket science, and all you have to do is follow a simple step-by-step process to unearth eye-opening insights.

Your Blueprint for Decoding Social Data

Scrape Your Social Data

First up, you need to gather, or “scrape,” your social data so the bots have something to analyze. Apify (https://apify.com) offers a clearinghouse of third-party tools focused on data extraction across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and many more platforms. These tools, also known as “actors,” can scrape all your public posts, including hashtags, date/time, content, media, calls to action, and so on. Most are free, but depending on the scope of the data or history of posts you analyze, there may be a cost. In most cases, these are quite nominal. In minutes, you'll have a comprehensive comma-separated ...