I use Facebook in a number of ways to reach people, stay connected to people around the world, communicate to my congregation and allow people to get to know me on a personal level. I’ll talk about several ways that you can use Facebook in future blog posts. Today I want to talk about Facebook ads.
If you look at my Sunday Setlist blog posts, you’ll see a little picture of the series we’re in with our church’s website on it. Those aren’t our official series graphics – those are our Facebook ads. I run Facebook ads from Thursday through Sunday each week for people within 10 miles of my campus’ city. You can get specific about who you’re trying to reach (men, women, young and old, people that are members of your church’s Facebook page or people that are not a part of your church’s Facebook page). I usually run the ads so that just people that are not already members of our church’s Facebook page can see them. I don’t want our people clicking on the ad and using up our daily limit.
One tip I’ll encourage you to do is to track who comes to your church via Facebook. Our bulletins have a Communication Card (which we use for a number of reasons). On that Communication Card, we ask people:
How did you hear about Forest Park?
- Invitation
- Billboard/Sign
- Website
- Facebook/Twitter
- Mailer/Postcard
- Newspaper
If you collect this data for months, you can see where most people are coming from and really invest in that area. For example, if you run newspaper ads and after 6 months, you realize no one has come to your church via the newspaper – STOP running newspaper ads. If you see people are coming due to direct mail pieces and/or Facebook ads – INVEST in those. Get it? By the way, it’s always encouraging to see people check off that they came due to one of our people inviting them. Track and measure where people are coming from.
Back to Facebook ads – I ask our designer to create me Facebook ads for each series we do and I run them throughout the series. Below I’ll show you examples of our Facebook ads. They need to be simple (less text is more).
This is our current series starting this Sunday (going with the whole “Back to School” theme)
This is our last series we finished this past Sunday
Next to last series
Next to next to last series
This was our series to kickoff 2012
*** I should mention that we are a multi-site church and this is just something that we do at my campus. If you remember my background, I’m huge into social media and have a marketing background. We have seen tremendous growth at our campus due to Facebook and social media. At our last Lead Team meeting, our Lead Pastor shared that all 3 of our campuses were growing, but that the Carthage Campus (my campus) was up 35% over this time last year – far ahead of the other campuses. I contribute this to God first and foremost and many other things – one of which is my use of Facebook.
To give you an example, look at our Facebook analytics report I received on August 1st (keep in mind that my campus is the smallest campus of the 3 Forest Park campuses). Note our reach on Facebook compared to the other 2 larger campuses.
Forest Park Joplin Campus (Original and largest campus)
New Likes – 6
New Check-ins – 8
Talking About This – 18
Weekly Total Reach – 1,482
Forest Park North Campus (Second largest campus)
New Likes – 7
Talking About This – 14
Weekly Total Reach – 1,006
Forest Park Carthage Campus (Smallest campus)
New Likes – 9
New Check-ins – 1
Talking About This – 30
Weekly Total Reach – 8,215
*** Social media and online presence is something I always evaluated when I did a secret shopper and/or consulted with a church. Don’t be blind in this area – it’s too important!