How do you know if your Facebook Page fans like what you’re posting? It’s a good question, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve been posting status updates, links and videos for quite some time now. Are you posting too frequently? Are your connections sharing what you’ve posted? Are you losing fans?

For the most part, you know if what you’re posting is the good stuff. And you know your that your connections will like it and share it. You know this because you’re one of them.

But still, it’s a good idea to take a look at your Facebook Page stats to confirm your gut.

How to confirm what you suspect about your fans

Facebook Pages include a variety of reports on fan growth, engagement, subscriber drop-off, preferred content, and user engagement. Below are five ways to tell if your content is effective. Note that they provide meaning only when viewed in context of each other.

1. Daily active users

User activity in response to your content tells you how much they like it. According to Facebook, a user is active when they view or engage with your application or your application’s content. This includes:

• Users who visit your Page
• Users who view an application tab on a Page
• Users who published to news feed (stream) from your Page
• Users who “Liked” a stream story form your Page
• Users who commented on a stream story from your Page

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A chat with the founder of dotSUB from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Service provides subtitling of videos into multiple languages

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, businesses, foundations, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

One of my favorite Web 2.0 collaborate production sites of all time is dotSUB — tagline: “Any video. Any language.” I’ve been bumping into Michael Smolens, CEO and founder of the innovative startup, for the past couple of years at video and citizen media conferences on both coasts.

dotSUB is a Web-based tool that enables the subtitling, or captioning, of Web videos into other languages using human translators. The videos can be subtitled through volunteer crowdsourcing or restricted to professionals hired to complete the task for a business or project.

The genesis for dotSUB was Michael’s realization that English-only independent and documentary films, TV programs and videos could have a powerful, transformative effect if made available in dozens of other languages – and the same could hold true of foreign works shown in the U.S. with English subtitles. The service’s early years relied on the Wikipedia model of crowdsourced translations: Anyone could begin subtitling a film into his or her own language, and others could come along afterward to tidy up.

Apart from open, collaborative uses, dotSUB more recently has been used as a closed platform where media and entertainment companies or other organizations that don’t trust the open community could hire a team of professional translators to provide captions of TV programs, CEO speeches, corporate videos, training videos, marketing and advertising messages in multiple languages. And this, no doubt, is where dotSUB generates the bulk of its income, given that it can accomplish this task at a price considerably below traditional methods.

In a very real way, dotSUB is removing language and cost as barriers to cross-cultural communication using video.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

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Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, NGOs, foundations, educators, individuals.

Guest post by Allyson Kapin
Partner, Rad Campaign

The tools for taking action and effecting social change are getting more robust all the time. Here are five of my current favorites:

Frogloop

1I think Care2′s Frogloop is one of the most trusted sources among nonprofit campaigners for having the latest resources and best practices to engage activists and donors using multiple channels including email, texting and social media. Full disclosure: I’m the Blogger-In-Chief but I don’t think that clouds my judgment. :~)

OpenStreetMap

2OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the nation and the world created by regular people, Wikipedia-style. It’s a fantastic tool that nonprofits should be using more. It contains a lot more open data than Google Maps.

Threadsy

3If you’re the type of nonprofit campaigner who thrives off of multitasking, Threadsy could be a life saver. In a nutshell, it’s a dashboard that allows you to manage email, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging – all in one place! It was in beta but now it has just been released to the public.

Idealware

4Idealware provides some of the best research and data to help nonprofits make smart software decisions – anything from choosing open source content management systems and the differences between them to low-cost data visualization tools.

The Petition Site

5Care2′s The Petition Site enables anyone — not just nonprofits — to start a petition around social action issues, from stopping the Sable Island seal slaughter to protecting against new drilling.

In this series

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools

• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change

• 12 open source tools you should be using

• 6 productivity tools for social change

• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools

• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist

• Top cause organizations

Cool apps & sites to increase your organization’s productivity

Target audience: Social entrepreneurs, journalists, educators, nonprofits, social change organizations. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Dan Pacheco
CEO, FeedBrewer

My colleague JD Lasica recently asked me to compile a list of the five most important tools for helping people drive social change. I had a difficult time understanding exactly what qualifies as “social change,” so he cut me a break and said I could list tools for journalists. Since I’m now working on a startup called FeedBrewer, I decided to focus that even more and list tools for entrepreneurial journalists.

I drew inspiration from the Boulder-Denver tech startup community. This summer, my startup co-founders and I are participating in a “tech accelerator” and mentoring progam called The Founder Institute. Over four months, we’re meeting other entrepreneurs like ourselves, as well as CEOs of successful startups who listen to our ideas and give us honest feedback. We also meet with four others in pre-assigned teams to share ideas. Some of these tools came out of those sessions.

So here they are. If you have your own tools to share, please add them as a comment below or tweet them under Twitter hashtag #jstartuptools.

Evernote

1Recycle those spiral notebooks. A cloud-based notebook, Evernote makes it easy to record written and audio notes, as well as documents. Just input notes or drag and drop files, and they’re there for you to access on your iPhone and iPad. It’s a great desktop app, too.

The Twitter Times

2Too busy to click on all those links to stories from the people you follow on Twitter? The Twitter Times offers your own customized version of tweets from folks you follow that you can read in an automatically laid-out web newspaper form. It’s like Google News with a social filter. Check out JD’s version of the Twitter Times.

Printcasting

3Online news is great, but you can’t beat handouts for real-world meetings. If your stories are available in RSS feeds, use Printcasting to turn them into quick magazines that you can print and hand out at meetings, leave in coffee shops or give to friends and family.

Nameboy & NameStation

4You’ve got that great idea for an online news startup, but what to name it? Nameboy and NameStation are tools quickly find available domain names that use different combinations of words. You can even register them on the spot as you find them.

BuddyPress

5Ning will soon require every social network to pay or be shut down. If that doesn’t sit well with you and you have a WordPress site, install the BuddyPress plug-in. It adds user profiles, public and private groups and all the basic tools you need to run a social network.

FeelGood: A new approach to fight hunger from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Have you heard of FeelGood? It’s an innovative nonprofit social enterprise, based on 27 college campuses, that offers a new way to make a difference in the fight against hunger.

The program transforms students social entrepreneurs and responsible global citizens. Its goal is simple: End world hunger in our lifetime. They do it one grilled cheese sandwich at a time. Founded in 2005, FeelGood empowers college students to run nonprofit delis on their campuses, specializing in grilled cheese sandwiches that are given away for a voluntary donation. At the delis, students develop business skills, launch effective educational campaigns and initiate dialogues about the root causes of and solutions to poverty.

Fully 100 percent of the profits the students raise are invested in organizations with a track record of eradicating extreme poverty and empowering self-reliance. And here’s a remarkable stat: Every $100 invested in FeelGood yields $120 for certified organizations working to end global hunger.

I ran into FeelGood’s founders, Kristin Walter and Talis Apud-Martinez, at the last Social Capital Markets conference. (The next one will be Oct. 4-6 in San Francisco).

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

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Here’s a simple guide to getting started in 5 easy steps

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, businesses, educators, citizen publishers, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Azin Mehrnoosh
Founder, HiDef

Facebook isn’t just a potential market that many nonprofits haven’t yet tapped. It’s also a place for real-time personal conversation and feedback from your constituents. You shouldn’t treat it trivially, but you shouldn’t be afraid of it, either.

Many posts emphasize the need to get started on Facebook and offer a long list of tips. Those lists can be quite daunting, so in this post we’ll help you get up and running from ground zero — nice, easy and simple.

To start off, you should already have a personal Facebook account and be logged in. Don’t worry, you’re not going to share any of your personal information. Facebook just needs an administrator for your organization’s new Facebook Page, and you can do that via your personal account. You can add other administrators later.

Now, if you’re already familiar with Facebook for personal use, you’ll quickly notice how similar creating a Page for your organization is to your own Facebook profile. Most of the functions — like uploading pictures, posting updates, updating your organizational bio — are almost exactly the same.

Let’s get started!

Create an official Page

1For this step, navigate to http://www.facebook.com/page.

Note: Don’t create a “Community page.” Those are used for creating communities around ideas that don’t necessarily represent anything tangible.

Select your page type, give it the name of your organization, click the terms and conditions checkbox, and click “Create Official page.” It’s that simple.

Now you’ll do some configuration before you promote it to the world.

Upload a logo or image for your organization

2Make sure you have your logo or a clearly identifiable branding image that your potential Facebook fans will be able to draw lasting connections with. It’s important that this image match up with your website and even print materials. Photos of people are often more effective than a logo — sometimes you can incorporate the logo at the bottom of the image.

Put your mouse over the big gray “?” image and click “Change Picture.” Upload your logo or image by selecting one of the upload options.

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Guest post by Beth Kanter
bethkanter.org

Networked nonprofits know how to close the loop between social media and offline actions. They understand that it is a scaffolded process. Whatever channel they use, they’re building a bridge from online to on land. They’re masters at meeting their audience where they’re at and bringing them further along the ladder of engagement.

Take Twitter, for example. Once a nonprofit has developed a presence and a network – and has integrated regular and engaging tweeting into the workflow, the next step is to host a tweetup. What’s a tweetup? It’s an in-person meeting of Twitter users.

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An overview of software for multimedia editing, video hosting & podcasting

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, NGOs, citizen journalists, media makers. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kaitlin LaCasse and Laura S. Quinn
Idealware

Want to get started using audio or videos to engage your current supporters and pull in new ones? There are a number of tools that put multimedia within the reach of most nonprofits. In this excerpt from the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications and Outreach, we explore three related multimedia topics. First, we take a look at multimedia editing software, which can help you whip your audio or video files into shape for public distribution. Then we explore how video sharing websites can help you put your video into the world. Finally, we talk about podcasts, a way to let people easily subscribe to audio or video shows.

Multimedia editing

Multimedia editing software gives you the capability to create videos or audio recordings with a level of a polish that used to require a lot of expensive hardware. Good editing takes time and some skill, but a number of low-cost, straightforward packages put the tools within reach of any nonprofit.

With audio packages, you can edit interviews for length, cut “um”s and pauses, and add music or voiceover introductions. Both GarageBand (for the Mac) and Audacity (for the PC or Mac) are free, solid tools that provide all the functionality you’re likely to need. If you’re eligible for the Adobe donation program through TechSoup, you may be able to get professional-grade Adobe Audition for a $35 admin fee.

Video tools let you cut out pieces you don’t want, splice different sections together, and overlay graphics and text onto your piece. You might join an interview with a constituent together with scenes of your program participants, and put a title screen at the beginning — and even upload it to YouTube with a single click.

For Mac users, iMovie (free with the Mac OS X operating system) is a great editing tool for simple movies. The free editing software available for PCs, on the other hand — like Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Systems’ VideoSpin — can be difficult to work with, and often imposes insistent front-and-center ads or confusing limitations on supported formats. For PC users, a good alternative is Adobe Premiere Elements (pictured at right, $15 for nonprofits on TechSoup, or the movie editor is about $79 retail), which provides friendly features very similar to iMovie.

[Editors note: There are also a few online video editing options, including Jaycut.com (free), Motionbox.com (free), Moviemasher.com (free & open source) and Kaltura (fee-based and open source, though these solutions have serious limitations.]

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“Copyright? What’s Copyright?” by MediaEdLab on YouTube.

Apps to enhance your productivity, visibility & privacy

Target audience: Educators, citizen publishers, journalists, nonprofits, social change organizations. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Barbara K. Iverson, PhD.
Co-publisher, ChicagoTalks.org

Here are five of my favorite online tools that I regularly use during the course of my work week. Some of these would help anyone, but because most are free, they can help people who are working to advance social change, social good or social activism.

ReclaimPrivacy: Take control of your privacy

1As an educator, I sometimes resort to the “first do no harm” credo, so with the Facebook privacy changes still fresh in everyone’s mind, let me start with an app that lets you check how secure your Facebook information is: ReclaimPrivacy.org. You drag the app’s button to your browser, open your Facebook account and it does a privacy scan. Note, it does not check photos and status updates yet, but it checks how secure the rest of your Facebook settings are.

Creative Commons: Enabling sharing culture

2Creative Commons is a big favorite of mine. We publish our community news on ChicagoTalks.org using the CC license. Aside from being useful, the whole idea of CC helps people realize there are alternatives to business models based on scarcity. The videos about copyright, creative co-authorship and CC licenses are funny and educational.

Kachingle: Support your favorite sites

3I’m banking on micropayment systems that will appeal to people who want to pay creators and sites they like and patronize. Beyond a “donate to this site” button, I’m currently talking up Kachingle, and I urge any socially conscious sites to get Kachingle.

The idea is you put up a small amount of money, like $5 each month, that you are willing to give to sites you use. When you see a Kachingle button on a site, you click, and from then on, Kachingle keeps tracks of how many times you visit the site, as well as any others you Kachingle. Once a month, the money you pledged is divided proportionally among the various sites you Kachingled. I even did a movie for them, explaining why I like this cool app with the silly name. (Kachingle my site, ChicagoTalks, and I’ll Kachingle back.)

Lots of my friends think Kachingle won’t work, but it is gaining traction in Europe, and Pirate Bay has created a similar app, still in beta, called Flattr. For nonprofits, I think this is a way to promote community at the same time that you solicit some modest funds from your supporters.

Aviary: Breezy online image editing

4For online photo editing, I’ve been using Aviary lately instead of Picnik because Aviary includes image editing and most of what Picnik has but also includes a vector editor and a new audio editor and mix tool. It’s free and seems to be focused on artists and designers more than on hobbyists.

Zemanta: Enrich your blog posts

5Finally, I would recommend Zemanta to anyone who is blogging or publishing on the Web. Zemanta is a plug-in semantic web tool. When it is enabled, it will appear in the editing window of your blog, and it analyzes the text in your post (as you type it!) and makes suggestions for links, tags and images. You just click on suggestions that are relevant to add links, tags and images automatically.

When my reporters file a story, it makes it a snap to add links to maps, wiki pages and websites. Zemanta learns as you use it, so it can be kind of flaky when you first implement it, but it gets better the more you use it. This one you will need to try to fully grasp how useful it is. In our publishing, it saves us literally hours of work each week.

In this series

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools

• 6 productivity tools for social change

• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change

• 12 open source tools you should be using

• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools

• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist

• Creating media: Tools, tutorials, resources (Socialbrite)