Some helpful tips to help you make Facebook work for Giving Tuesday from Drew Bernard, CEO of http://actionsprout.com
Full video of the presentation is available at the end of the slide deck.
10. Post content again that is working
well on your own page
Adapt other pages high performing
content to fit your unique message
Re-post content that is performing
well on similar pages
Re-use
Borrow
Flatter
11. Finding Over-Performing Content
Look for content that perform significantly better than average,
relates to your work, and can have a call to action added to it
Yes it’s really that simple!
www.ActionSprout.com
14. Donate is not a socially sharable action
“Join is in thanking our amazing volunteers”
“Sign a letter to our super donor.”
“Show your support for kids!”
“Make a pledge to stand up for your rights!”
“Join us in congratulating…”
Give People Actions They Can Take
16. Get an email address so you can send
them a message on Give Tuesday
Facebook ID’s let you target promoted
posts and ads to them on Give
Tuesday
Email
FB-ID’s
CAPTURE
17. Email Promoted Posts
Go direct to deliver your donation ask
Post frequently about people giving and ask everyone to help thank them
Remember Facebook only delivers 15% of your posts
HI, I’m Drew. The CEO of ActionSprout; a Salsaintegrated Facebook app that helps organizationbuild relationships with people beyond Like, Share and Comment. As Cheryl and Christine said, give Tuesday is an all channel event! I am going to talk about just one of the channels today: FB. Like all of your communications channels FB requires some real planning and work to lay the foundation before December 3rd..
Before I begin, let me get the obligatory Facebook matters slide out of the way by simply saying that… if your target audience is human, they are probably spending 15 minutes or more a day on Facebook.
But just because your audience is on Facebook doesn’t make it a silver bullet. The painful truth, in my opinion, is that Facebook fails most organizations during campaigns like Give Tuesday. Not because Facebook isn’t a great channel, but because most organizations don’t really know how to leverage it in support of campaigns like Give Tuesday. I have seen Facebook fail even some of the most gifted campaigners and fundraisers. The reason for this is that Facebook is different from other campaigning tools. Don’t get me wrong, the value it can provide is significant, but it’s not what most people expect, or even hope for when they first start using it. My goal for this presentation is to offer up some practical things you can, and perhaps should, be doing on Facebook to support Give Tuesday. I’ll also try to leave a little time at the end to share some idea for what you might want to do on Facebook on Give Tuesday itself. So, grab a pen and let’s go.
Okay, so you have 10 weeks between now and Give Tuesday. That really not a lot of time! And what you do between now and December 3rd really will determine the impact FB has on your overall campaign that day.
How do you get the greatest value out of Facebook in supporting a campaign goal, such as Give Tuesday? You can boil it down into three word, Reach, Prime and Capture… These are the three things I will touch on today. Reach is what I will spending most of my time because without it, nothing else really matters… Then, I’ll talk a bit about priming supporters to become action takers and not just consumer of your content…And third, I will end by talking about capturing data like Email addresses and Facebook user id’s so you can actually reach them on December 3rd and beyond.
So lets start with reach… As I said before, without reach, nothing else really matters on Facebook. And when it comes to reach on Facebook, it’s all about your Fans and your newsfeed. Sure, your page is your brand on Facebook, and I don’t want to disparage that, but let’s be honest, very few people visit your FB page. And when they do, it’s usually because they are following something that originated in your newsfeed…
And unless you’re paying to promote every post you publish on Facebook, your posts only travel as far as your Fans and their friends are spreading them. Another way to put this is simply that Fans ARE your Facebook page. You target content at them, engage with them, and reach people through them. Thus, just as it can make sense to pay to promote some posts in order to reach more of your Fans, it also pays to invest in growing your FB fan base with high-quality supporters. I agree entirely with Cheryl that one of the best ways to do this that I don’t see happening nearly enough is converting Email supporters to Fans on FB, too. And, if you can do this in a way that allows you to learn which email supporters are Fans too, even better!
But when it come to reaching people through your Fans, you need to engage your Fans with content that will get them clicking, whether that’s simply clicking like or share, commenting or taking a higher level action like signing a letter, pledging to do something or whatever. Content is always king on any communication channel. But unlike channels like email or your newsletter, without without good, engaging content, you can’t even reach the people you want to reach. So, how do create great content that will get people engaging?
It may be easier that you think. If you want to post great content, start with great content. Facebook is a sharing platform. Think about it, the VAST majority of content that you see on Facebook every day is shared, not created… Lean into this fact.
A reasonable goal is to have 80% of your posts contain content that has, in one way or another, already proven to have viral potential. The other 20% should be original content… (oh, but don’t be surprised when 80% of that fails to take off)What do I mean by content that has proven to have viral potential?Here are three examples:Re-use your own top performing content. If you posted something a couple weeks or months ago that really resonated with your audience and is still relevant today, post it again! Keep in mind that Facebook is only delivering your posts to 10% to 20% of your Fans each time you post.Borrow great ideas from other pages. If you see a great meme, why not do something similar?Finally, don’t be afraid to simply grab a top performing post form a related page and push it out on your wall. It’s a good idea to give the source credit, but trust me when I say this is a TOP strategy for many of the top performing FB pages.
Finding high performing content on FB is getting easier and easier. If you have ActionSprout, you’ll see the top performing content from your own network directly inside the tool on the Inspire Tab. I should probably mention that any of you can use the tool for free for 30-days. But we also have a Free forever tool we call our Facebook Page Analyzer that allows you to do a quick analysis of any Facebook page. This is quick and free way to find the top performing posts from any page on Facebook. You can find a link to this on our website too. There is another awesome paid app called Crowdtangle that makes it really easy to find top performing content from pages on Facebook as well. It’s worth checking out, too.
Here’s an example of a post that the FB page managers at the Democratic Governor's Association pushed out on a Bill Clinton’s birthday. Do you think he has ever seen posts celebrating Bill Clinton succeed on his page before? Of course he has. So this year, Mark quickly spun up a similar post one he pushed out last year. But this time, he included a simple yet relevant call to action inviting people sign a birthday card. This simple reused post accomplished 5X the engagement of his average FB post.
Okay, so I have talked about the importance of creating content that will engage your fans and reach your target audience.Let’s move on the next key topic… Priming people to take action. In a perfect world, every single post you push out on Facebook should be working to Prime people to become action takers for your cause. One good way to do this is by driving people to take action. Even if that action is simple and lightweight, giving people ways to engage with your work is often the best way to cultivate them online.Diving Action from your Facebook page can take a number of forms…
This is, of course why ActionSprout exists, but even if you don’t use ActionSprout, you should be asking supporters to take meaningful actions with and for you. Between now and Give Tuesday, I would think about action that will prime them to be involved on Give Tuesday. Some examples of actions I would suggest thinking about between now and GT include things like: Ask them to join you in THANKING your donors and supporters. Invite them to join you in congratulating someone in your network that did something great that furthered your mission. Or, give people a way to sign a petition or pledge to do something that will resonate with them and relates to your mission.By the way, donate is not a viral action.
Here’s another simple action that stays with the birthday… This is a post that the National Parks Conservation Association pushed out not long ago that went nicely viral. Like the DGA post, it fit squarely in the 80 rule. The FB manager knew from past experience that posts that celebrate our national parks do great! Moreover, posts with iconic images from parks, particularly ones with kids in them, do very well with their audience. So, when the National Park Services' 97th birthday rolled around, they posted their usual Happy Birthday post. And, just like Mark at the DGA, they included a simple call to action and let people sign a birthday card. If you think about it, the simple act of signing a birthday card for the National Parks Service is a nice light way to educate and prime people to become deeper supporters of NPCA’s mission over time.But that wasn’t all that this action did for NPCA. It also resulted in the organization capturing 162 new emails from people that care enough about the about the National Parks Service to sign a birthday card and 2236 Facebook user id’s which they can use for retargeting at some day down the road.
Which is a good segway into my final topic… Capture data so you can reach and engage people directly on and off Facebook!This maybe the simplest point in my presentation, really…
Simply put, if you’re not capturing email addresses or Facebook UI’s you will not be able to reach people on December 3rd…
Okay so that’s the last of the Reach, Prime and Capture slides In fact I am on my last slight of my deck here… So, let me talk a little about what you should be doing on Give Tuesday itself. First, if there was ever a day to reach people, this is it! So pull out the stop and do whatever you can to drive people to donate. For the past 10 weeks hopefully you will have been working to reach, prime and capture people on FB. Now’s the time to activate them. Send an email to the people that have taken action on your page asking them to help you get things started. You might also want to pay to promote your posts on Give Tuesday. Even a small amount of money can boost reach quite a bit for many pages. The best way to do this is push out a post… If it does well, in terms of engagement, wait until the organic engagement starts to taper off and then through a little money at it. There are are different ways to target promoted posts on FB including targeting all your Fans of course, but you can create custom audiences that are made up of people you have Email Addressed or Facebook User Id’s and then target your promoted posts to them. In terms of what to post on Give Tuesday: Don’t be afraid to post more than usual. Even a lot more! You want to be on people newsfeeds! If you can find great content that fits into the 80% rule that makes sense to send out on Give Tuesday, USE IT! Otherwise you’ll be creating a lot of the 20% content and as I said before, 80% of that will fail to really take off. Topic wise, when you’re thinking about what original content to write, celebrate the successes that your supporters are helping your accomplish (both in relation to the campaign and you mission. I would also THANK the people that engage with you and support you work. Don’t be afraid click over to a person’s FB page and drop them a Direct Message saying thank you from you personally!And of course you’ll want to drive people to donate! You can collect donations directly inside Facebook ActionSprout to try to keep the viral energy up as high as you can, but there is nothing wrong with sending them to your donation page on this day. Just keep in mind that on Give Tuesday, your Fans, your Supporters are the channel through witch you will reach and activate other people on Facebook. And, I am about out of time. So, back to you…