Advanced Facebook Engagement Strategy with ActionSprout

Suppose you’re ready to re-engage with an email or mobile phone list of folks who signed up for your campaign or cause but haven’t been active for six to 12 months or more.

First, I would work with longtime partner Accurate Append to validate the email and phone data. From there, you can use Facebook audiences to match a list of Facebook users who have given up on your mail or texting program. But how to engage formerly active subscribers on Facebook in such a way that they’ll reliably warm back up to you?

ActionSprout, a set of activist tools for Facebook, comes in handy here. One, you can use petitions and ad targeting to get your dormant supporters excited again. Two, you can target that list with the most highly engaging content possible so that when they see you in the inbox they are primed to click in, support, and give.

Shawn Kemp, co-founder of ActionSprout, and I wrote last year for Campaigns and Elections about how grassroots organizations can effectively use engagement advertising to win support. It starts with using the “Inspiration” feature to follow Facebook pages that are posting the kind of content your supporters typically engage with. Find highly performing content daily and post it to your page with your own messaging style.

You can also use ActionSprout’s new advanced Facebook story searching to fine tune and discover the very best content for your re-engagement audience.

To ensure you’re getting a signal from your target audience and not just the most active fans of your page, use a small daily ad spend in Business Manager across the custom audience plus variations that layer in Facebook interest targeting. You can do this easily in ActionSprout with the “Promote” button inside your “Timeline.” Both Facebook Page Insights and ActionSprout’s Timeline will help you understand what’s performing best. You can then easily adjust ad spend or audiences to take advantage of top-performing content.

Engagement opportunities are the huge benefit of this kind of advertising — use communications staff or volunteers to engage with supporters in the comments of your viral posts. In public replies or private Messenger chats from your page, invite them to explore new opportunities with the campaign.

Happy organizing.