Make a Facebook Playbook for Early-stage Startups and Scrappy Nonprofits
Make Facebook a useful tool for your organization in 10 easy steps
Here’s a quick and simple guide to using Facebook to acquire more users and donors. Ten steps to create a Facebook Playbook for your small, scrappy startup in just a couple of hours. This guide is for people doing more with less.
1. Identify the goals of your campaign
Why do you want to use Facebook?
Don’t go on Facebook just to be on Facebook. It’s a tool, so it needs a purpose, otherwise, like anything else, it’s just a waste of time. Facebook reinforces your message and brand. Facebook is most useful as a way to test content and distribute your existing content. You can run two campaigns with different taglines and see which one gets better results. It’s easier than AB testing on your website.
Facebook observes which ads are getting the most responses and promotes them more. Facebook makes it clear which posts are the most effective without any no fancy math or analytics. This makes ads more effective.
Social Media requires ongoing maintenance
Much like a garden in the summer time, it needs constant attention. Facebook needs 20 minutes 3x per week. Facebook is more like an aggregator that amplifies and shares your existing content. You need to get “likes” or your posts will fall off people’s feeds. You can use programs like buffer.app to load posts on a weekly basis.
There are two types of content on Facebook: posts and ads.
Anatomy of a post, called a “story”
- Catchy headline and call to action — YOU MUST HAVE A CALL TO ACTION
- Image (Facebook is a visual medium, so always use pictures.)
- Link back to the content
Ads
- Run on the margin, on mobile, and in the newsfeed
- You much have a call to action like “learn more” in the button or copy
- You must use a call to action for best results
- Avoid visual fatigue and use at least 5 different images
I consult with Samahope, an innovative crowdsourcing funding for doctors in developing counties. As an example, here are Samahope’s goals of using Facebook.
Get Facebook users to convert to donors (Show me the money!)
- Define messaging
- Develop solid taglines
- Identify the most responsive audience(s)
- Increase Facebook followers by 1000 by EOM
- Increase donations — 5% of FB visitors donate
2. Research similar organizations to get a benchmark.
- How are other groups using Facebook?
- How many “likes” do they have?
- What is the average number of “likes” per post?
- Are they using ads?
- What do the Facebook ads look like?
3. Leverage existing networks
- Ask friends and associates to follow you on Facebook
- Add a Facebook link to your website and on your email communications to your networks
- Cross post with larger related organizations and friends
4. Test Ad Campaigns
- Create three 3 adds for each audience with 5 images each to test different byline
- Run campaign for 4 days M-Th
Example of Ad Copy:
Samahope
Enabling anyone, anywhere to fund a life-changing surgery.
5. Curate content
- Post 1 time per day to Samahope Facebook
- Post a 3:1 ratio of external curated content and relevant to Samahope’s audience
- Reuse content from Twitter and other social media sites
- Feature work by friends and allies
- News, current events, blogs etc.
6. Promote original content
- Use knowledge from the Test Ad Campaign about what messaging appeals the most to your audience.
- Write useful content to for the best audience and use paid Facebook promotion to boost its reach.
7. Leverage Website (as resources allow)
- Ask people to follow on Facebook
- Add a Facebook tag to the emails
- Prompt people to share they made a donation on Facebook?
8. Cycle through different types of available content
- Quotes
- Infographics
- Events
- Cross post Tumblr and Facebook
- great photos and great quotes
- Animated short
- DR Videos
- Images
9. Each week, review the results of your campaigns and adjust.
Samahope found ads with specific copy like “Fund Doctors” or “Fund Surgeries” had better results than more general tag lines like “Give hope” or “change a life.
Here are other insights Samahope gained from Facebook testing.
- WOMEN are the audience
- Posts in the NEWS FEED are an effective way of promoting our content
- Broad categories have the best results: like women, doctors, medical students and pre med students, people who donated to health related causes etc.
- (Smaller categories and affiliations didn’t deliver donors because of low numbers. Are there thoughtful tie in/cross post or partnership we can do with these groups/authors/causes)
- MOBILE ads are also effective
10. Share what you learn with the rest of your team.
Recommendations for Samahope based on Facebook testings results:
- Drive home the message of “fund doctors”
- Include an urgent call to action across all content. Create deadlines, for example, we need “$XX by the end of the week to ensure Dr. X can do Y”
- Leverage your existing content (like the doctor bios) by posting it in the Facebook feed
- Use more baby pictures across all content, also, experiment with medical diagram drawings