Hispanic Surge On Facebook

May 8, 2009      Admin

Writing in Engage: Hispanics, interactive marketing consultant Lee Vann provides this astonishing stat: Back in February 2008, Facebook produced a Spanish-language version (note: with help from its user community). At the time, there were 2.3 million Facebook users in Spanish-speaking countries. Within six months that number had shot up to 9.9 million, a remarkable gain of 7.5 million!

In addition, the number of Spanish-preferring US users of Facebook climbed to one million, driven by this new opportunity to connect with friends and relatives abroad.

If Hispanics constitute an important segment of your nonprofit’s international or national target audience, this is animportant phenomenon in its own right. But there’s a bigger point here.

Vann notes the disproportionate use of social net sites by Hispanics, which he attributes to a combination of younger age profile and cultural values that emphasize family and community.

I think this is a key point for any nonprofit experimenting with the social sites … you can’t "manufacture" a community. All you can really hope to do is enable or facilitate one to assemble around your cause, mission or particular set of values. People must have pretty strong motivation to do that, once again pointing to the importance of bringing forward the emotional side of your organization’s appeal.

Tom

P.S. I should note that our own DonorTrends surveying also indicates a important by-product of Hispanics’ social nature. Hispanic donors are nearly twice as likely (at 38%) to be recruiters for causes they support than the overall donor population (at 20%). We touch on this in our forthcoming White Paper … DonorSuperstars. Watch for it next week.