This past month Facebook unveiled a new option where users may “promote” their posts, meaning that more people will see your post as it will be placed at the top of their news feed. Of course, there is a catch – it costs $7 per post. If you’re planning on promoting a post that contains simply a picture of what you had for lunch, this may not be for you. But if you’re a nonprofit trying to get your word out there, this option could do wonders for your cause.
Last Monday in Beth’s Blog she made a post describing how to decide if this option makes sense for you to use. They conducted a onth long study to decide if this new feature really is beneficial.
They first had to decide what their goal is. Their goal is to develop an active community of fans around the topics of philanthropy and social
change. Beth showed something called a “Social Funnel” in her post, which depicts how fans interact with them on social media. This funnel has awareness at the top, engagement in the middle, and donations at the bottom (the smalles part).
For this experiment Beth made 6 posts, 3 promoted, and 3 not promoted; she then tracked their success in terms of clicks, likes, and donations. What they learned through this is that promoting posts is extremely helpful in terms of engagement, increasing it by as much as 7x more engagement. However, the financial terms varied depending on the content of the post – the common, everyday posts didn’t have much of a return, but the timely and unique ones brought in almost $600 per week.
What this means fr you and your nonprofit is that if you have the means to promote your posts on Facebook you should go ahead and do it, just don’t get too comfortable doing it because your posts will become the “everyday type of post and bring in little return.
