Have you tried Facebook Advertising?

by Ryan Garnett on April 9th, 2016

How many of your likes do you expect you’re reaching through your Facebook posts? 100%? 75%? 50%? The truth is that you’re likely only reaching 5-10% of your likes. Maybe 15% if you’re lucky. Why? Because this is exactly the way Facebook wants it.

They continue to refine their algorithm to ensure that the only way you can reach most of your supporters is through Facebook Advertising. Luckily though advertising on Facebook is still fairly inexpensive, and it’s something you should be testing for your charity.

There are three primary tools within Facebook advertising that you should be considering – Boosting your posts, increasing page likes, and sending people to your website. Each can be effective depending on what your purpose is.

Boosting a post (or multiple posts) is most effective for increasing your visibility and awareness. You can choose to boost your post to your likes (ensuring they all see it) or you can boost it beyond your own page, choosing demographic selections that work the best for you.

Increasing page likes is viable as an entry strategy if you eventually plan to boost posts to your likes. Just increasing your likes won’t do a lot of good on its own as you’ll only reach a small percentage of your actual likes. If one of the goals set out by your board is to increase the likes on Facebook this could be the tool for you.

Sending people to your website is most effective if you’re looking for donations. Be sure that if you are using this you send them to a page that clearly identifies your mission and provides an easy way to donate. Ideally this would already be part of your homepage, but if it’s not be sure you make the updates before testing.

Any of these options can be tested at a very small cost. $5/day is actually enough to start testing one of these tools in Facebook Advertising. If you plan to test all three I’d recommend a budget of around $15/day to start. This works out to less than $500 in a month of Facebook Advertising. If you’re able to convert even a small number of your new likes to donors, you’ll easily see a return on your investment. And you’re also be building a following, which if well-cultivated and stewarded, will be a strong pool of potential future donors for you. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *



    Let us know how we can help you

    Thank you for dropping by! Leave us a message and one of our HMA team members will be in touch with you soon.