Miheret has learned a lot about using Facebook for ministry. He helped with a Facebook page for the “Love Ethiopia Festival with Andrew Palau”. (Read the impact report from the Luis Palau Association to learn what God did.) This post was published in late October with his advice and tips for keeping engagement high on a Facebook page to promote an event.
We are having a Luis Palau event in Addis Ababa from November 16-17. About two months ago, I approached the conference team about what they could do on Facebook. They had 500 likes on the Love Ethiopia Festival Facebook page in more than 5 or 6 months time and the posting wasn’t creating as much engagement as they desired. Since my team and I took the role of administrating the page, we reached 10,000 in about two weeks and the weekly reach is now always more than 100K.
Today, we celebrated 29,500 likes with our members! This project really helped me to learn a lot about Facebook, especially how to do ads in a way to bring more likes or engagement. (These two actions work completely differently. )
Your role as a Facebook page host
- Be a good listener: as much as possible respond to members’ questions, likes, and messages promptly.
- Try to post consistently… pictures are always great.
- Post clear information or else you’ll receive unexpected questions from confused readers. 🙂
- Ask friends to like, comment and share your page posts.
- Pay attention to your page stats, but look also at engagement. That’s where you will see real results beyond numbers.
Increase your page engagement with ads
Engagement ads are run for specific posts. You have three ways to focus these ads…
- On members: What you’re saying is seen or heard by members.
- On friends of friends: Target friends of your Facebook page members to increase engagement.
- By location : Facebook allows you to run post engagement ads based on location, opening up interesting interactions with people.
I know these are brief, so I’ll write more about them soon in this Facebook ministry post series .
More tips
Picture posts go further than plain text posts. If your post is a picture, you can use a small budget ($5 might be enough) and tag people as much as possible to bring some excellent results. If you’re posting a text or a link to a website, you may need more in your budget and make sure your post is short and encourages a response from people.
Post timing is also key in doing Facebook promotion. I will write about this and other tips in the next post.
How do you keep your engagements high on Facebook?
Guest Post by Miheret Tilahun, Director for Digital Strategies for Southern and Eastern Africa, Campus Crusade for Christ. Miheret’s blog is My Generation for Christ. He also guest posted on eQuipping for eMinistry where he shared thoughts from Isaiah 40 in The Internet Is Our Mountain.
Miheret explains, “I started ministry when I was 12 years old in local church and I was involved in Student Led Movement since high school with local Campus Crusade for Christ. I joined on staff October 2008. I am passionate in using Internet and media for accelerating ministry and reaching many for Jesus. I am based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.”
Find Miheret on Twitter at Mercy4u.
PRAY: for Southern and Eastern Africa at Pray4SEA.org.
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Keep your Facebook Engagement High by Miheret Tilahun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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