Ten years ago, Facebook was all about photos and food. A quick browse through your Facebook feed would involve liking pictures of your friends’ latest adventures and commenting on their witty status about what they had for lunch.
Today, Facebook is a very different place. Not only are there a lot more people — 1 in 7 people on the planet is active on Facebook at least once a month — but there are also a lot more businesses and organizations vying for attention in the News Feed. There’s a good chance your nonprofit already has a Facebook Page, but you may not feel like you’re getting much out of it. With all the competition in the marketplace, is your time spent on the world’s biggest social platform worth the effort?
Here’s the truth: The only thing worse than giving up on your Facebook Page is treating it like an obligation. Don’t post “because everyone else is.” With a little bit of elbow grease, you can turn your Facebook Page into a content powerhouse for your organization. Before you can be successful, however, you need to understand what you’re up against.
Know Your Competition
Though Facebook has enabled powerful tools for businesses and organizations over the past few years, you have to realize when you post that you’re not the only one on the platform. The Facebook News Feed is a great equalizer. It puts millions of disparate ideas all on the same level playing field. Every photo, link, or text post you share from your Page appears in the same place as everything else. When you post about your latest fundraising effort, you must understand that it’s competing with an exciting video from someone’s favorite sports team, a selfie of their best friend, or a heartfelt message from their mother.
When you put your status updates into that kind of perspective, you’ll start to think a little harder about what you post and how you post it. Breathe a little life into your updates! Add some excitement. Use rich media like compelling photos or auto-playing videos to capture your audience. If you’re not interesting enough, the typical Facebook user will just scroll right past you… or worse yet, not see your updates at all.
What’s an Algorithm?
Besides the competition you’re facing, there’s one key factor about Facebook you need to understand. No matter who you are, no matter how hard you try, not all of your fans are going to see your updates. This is just as true for huge corporate powerhouses like Starbucks or McDonald’s as it is for fledgling nonprofits. And if you’re smart, you’ll start taking advantage of this fact to compete with organizations that have 100 or 1,000 times the social media budget you do.
Facebook has a seemingly endless number of factors that determine how it places items in every person’s individual News Feeds. You don’t need to understand all of them, or even know what they all are, but you do need to take a few key ones to heart. The main factors to focus on are relevance, engagement, and time. Your updates must speak to a user in a way that is personal to them, they must encourage a user to engage with your content in a meaningful way, and they must be timely.
We’re talking about the difference between a dry paragraph that encourages donors to give versus a well-made video that shows donors what they are giving to. The first is a boring wall of text that most Facebook users would just scroll past. The second is something that people actually want to watch and share with their friends.
Putting It All Together
By taking steps to make your updates and content more compelling, you can grow your Facebook audience by a sizable amount, and at the same time, increase the number of your fans that see and engage with your organization. And as you know, the more people you can reach, the more money you can raise for your mission. One more individual helped in a real way makes your social media venture worth the time and effort.
You’ve got the basics. Ready to take your social media to the next level? DonorLynk’s experts have years of experience helping nonprofits thrive and have consulted on social media campaigns for major national brands. Get in touch with one of our specialists today to learn how we can help you become a social media powerhouse.