091021 Facebook Promotion
by Alnisa Allgood
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Promoting Your Nonprofit on Facebook and Having Facebook Promote Your Nonprofit. ...
Promoting Your Nonprofit on Facebook and Having Facebook Promote Your Nonprofit.
So you have a Nonprofit Fan Page on Facebook, now what? Facebook has over 300 million users, with more than 85 million unique visitors per month. This workshop covers building a strong brand identity in Facebook using Tools from Facebook and intermixing with current media efforts. Part 2 of 3 Facebook for Nonprofits Series.
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Jonathon Colman @jcolman
(a) Summary of Part One
(b) Overview Marketing/Promotion
(c) Promoting On Facebook
(d) Integrating Facebook to Other Promotions
(e) Analytics/Return on Investment (ROI)
1: Your Most Valuable Asset In social media, which Facebook is, your reputation is a very valuable asset. Everything counts, but you don’t need to be perfect. Perfect is suspect. You need to be human, personable. Have quirks, have a personality. Carefully crafted press releases don’t frequently work here. Quick responses, quick ideas, do.
2: Be ProlificIn academia they frequently say, “Publish or Perish” the same is true for social media. Publish frequently. Now the good thing is, you don’t have to write books, tomes, or even mantras (though you can). You can start out Twitter style with 140 characters if you like. The posts don’t need to be large, they just need to be.
3: Be UbiquitousGet to know people, let them get to know you. It’s your organization, yes, but you want it to have a personality, a reputation. Reputations build one person at a time, frequently using word of mouth. So make sure your communicating. But remember not to always be self-promoting. Have a conversation. Introduce yourself to people.
4: Be GenerousMy personal favorite of these six traits is to be generous. If you’re not much of conversationalist, focus on generosity. Offer advice, links to resources, fun thins, interesting things, news, or random things. But give.
5: Be DependableCheck your page once a day, twice a week, whatever your schedule. But make it regular, and reply back to people. If someone leaves a comment, respond or at least say thanks. If someone posts information, read it, skim, say thanks or add your response.
6: Be CredibleCheck your sources, admit when you were wrong, provide a visual growth of your experience. Using social media to provide insight, transparency. You can even do quick summary/pointers: Last year we did this and this, here’s what we learned. Facebook notes are great for that, or point back to your website.
Every organization has a brand. It’s just that for most it will never become a United Way or a Red Cross. Well you don’t have to be large to become well-known, and you can build an enviable relationship with your fans (aka constituents) without having 5,000 or 50,000 of them.
For example, this image is of the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation (SACH) a small nonprofit in India. They would be a very local organization without social media. But they have 300+ fans, and growing, mostly international.
It’s not a lot of fans, but imagine if you could reach 300+ people who have never heard of your organization before. Who don’t even live in the state, city, or neighborhood you serve; but who still love your organization.
If you don’t have cute kittens and babies, you have ‘work’. Yeah! Life’s painful.
(10) to strengthen your organizations brand
How it Works. When you update either your personal or page status, that news gets published in a stream. All your friends and/or all your fans get that update in their news streams. (remember issues of latency or speed: people with large numbers of friends may not see your update, since their stream moves faster; people with a small number of friends may get overwhelmed since their stream rarely updates)
What’s Great About It? Word of mouth and commentary. If someone finds something you said interesting they might recommend it to a friend, a first step for a new fan. Someone may like/dislike or comment. Comments spread the word to ALL their friends, as well as provide opportunity to engage.
It’s work, but paying attention to what people have liked or disliked, as well as what has generated comments, will help you grow and learn. You don’t want to 180 your personality, but adding more of what people respond to helps with communication and engagement. So maybe 20-40º, magnify the things of interest, but don’t avoid the components that make your brand, your brand.
Events are very good at spreading the word of your existence on Facebook. Don’t ONLY post to Facebook, but adding Facebook to the mix of public calendars, flyers, and other announcement is darn good strategy.
Promote events to your Fans, absolutely, but don’t forget your friends as well. You can even add notes to encourage your friends to promote to their friends.
This can grow your attendance, and that’s wonderful. If we do a workshop on events, we can delve into that more. But since we’re talking more about brand promotion, think of it this way…
Even if only 5 additional people signed up to attend your event, if you were able to send the event to 50, 200, 500, and have that be converted to 65, 400, or 1000 invites, that means word of mouth about you and your events is growing. The more invitees who invite, the more your brand gets spread.
That said, Causes is one of the premier nonprofit platforms inside of Facebook, besides Facebook Pages.
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/
Their Website Address is
http://www.causes.com
They are great, because they are a platform right inside Facebook that can help you better leverage Facebook, and interact with your normal marketing strategy, etc. Let’s provide an example: Idealist.org
It tracks how many people have been recruited to the cause. Thank yous, donations, and overall impact.
The Home tab can highlight whatever activity you like, or just use one provided by Causes. The About tab provides information about your organization and or cause. The members tab provides you details about who has joined your cause, when, and even allows personal communications.
Causes can be a very powerful platform for use. Allowing your fans to do recruitment and appeals for you. It even allows your organization to promote and support other organizations.
Playing around with Ads is easy and not costly. You can set an amount like $25 as the most you want to spend, to do a simple promotion, and play with it.
You create your ad (landing pages are important) even within Facebook, if it’s a Cause your promoting take them directly to the cause. Same with your website. Don’t send people to a home page. Send them to a custom page with a message of why they are there.
You can target audience and then bid on.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is probably the best option, for now, since cost per click can be very low. Depending on time, market and other variables, you can occasionally bid as low as 10 cents and still get clicks and exposure. Though, I should say, typical rates can range from $0.25 to $1.00 or more. I typically never bid more than $1, but have seen people go as high as $5 per click.
The benefit is two fold with PPC. While you pay for actual clicks. You still get views/exposures at no cost. Meaning some one could see your ad, recall your name and search for it, or come back latter without clicking the ad. For a PPC of 5 clicks, exposure could be in the thousands.
If your set aside $100 or $200 and run $25 campaigns. You can run 4 to 8 campaigns, spread out over a 2-6 month period, providing a nice raise in name recognition, even if it doesn’t translate to clicks.
This is a very underused feature, but you can think of it like Craigslist. You can post for volunteers, items you want donated, and more.
Really, your use of this may vary depending on the type of organization you are. But if you have occasional need of things, you can cultivate the marketplace as an area of giving. Ask for markers for your after school program, or a barcode scanner for your in-house library. Volunteers for specific tasks. I have no specifics, but I’d assume one of tasks may work best— we need a volunteer to design flyer, be a docent, etc.
I really have no statistics on this area, so it would be your own personal exploration. But remember, if your posting it on Facebook, hit Madison’s Craigslist and neighborhood listservs as well.
If you’re organization is already prolific, Facebook Notes can spike the power and add punch to your messages. If you’re not so prolific you can still use notes to your advantage.
Notes can act as an amplifier or a multiplier, which ever term works best for you. As few as 30 fans tagged in a note, can get your message to over 1,000 people.
John Haydon, who does Cause Marketing for nonprofits, details this more in his post ‘How To Use Facebook Notes To Get More Traffic’. Because ‘Tagged Notes’ show up not just to your fans, but to their friends as well. Tagging one person with 200 friends can potentially get you 200 views.
And while John talks more about how to import your RSS feed into notes; remember Notes are not automatically tagged. When handwriting notes, or after a note has been imported in, you would need to go back and manually tag it.
PS: Try to know your friends and fans, and make sure the note may be of interest or relevant to them. Use tags responsibly.
I’m certain there are limits on how many people you can tag, but it’s a fair number; and really you should never hit it. Typically, we recommend tagging in the 1-50 range. The more focused the tagging the better, but whimsy has some relevance. Meaning, if you plan on tagging 10 people, make 8-9 directly related somehow to the note, even if its just by casual interest. But make 1 or 2 tags people you just don’t know if they would be interested or not, or who’ve you’ve never communicated with, etc. It’s a way to draw people in, a little bit at a time.
So now let’s go over ways to integrate Facebook with your other marketing strategies.
So if you have space for it, or tell your web developer to make space for it. Grab the code for adding a Fan Box from Facebook.
Integrate Facebook with Twitter (check), even works both ways, Facebook can send to Twitter or Twitter can send to Facebook
Integrate Facebook with your Blog/website (check). Display fans and increase fans by using Fan Box; import RSS feeds from your website into Facebook, and then tag relevant parties. You can export your Facebook Notes RSS feed to your website, or promote subscription to both (if they aren’t duplicative)
You can make it easier for people to reference things from your website, and post to Facebook for their friends, etc.
Which methods you use or what you want to do is up to you; not all things are possible yet, but a number of things are.
Give up your control issues. If you’re NOT going to do it yourself, then let who’s doing it do it. Simple management and making sure they understand current vision, mission, and goals. But try not to ‘loose their enthusiasm’ under too much management before you get started.