Make Sure Facebook is Worth Your Effort
This week we published a free ebook, co-authored with recent Three Things guest-columnist Shabbir Safdar, entitled, “Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It?“ In the book, we document our deep dive into nearly a year of data on UNICEF-USA’s Facebook efforts to demonstrate the mechanics and value of setting up a robust measurement system to ensure your investment of time and resources on Facebook is delivering results.
Facebook’s seemingly daily schedule of changes in policy, nomenclature, and tools had rendered some details in the ebook already in need of updating (updates are in progress), the crux remains true: no matter the constellation of tools, page types, and lingo (are you a “fan” or do you just “like” me?), you should have an approach to gathering actionable analytics that tell you what works, what doesn’t, and what you should test.
You can download the free ebook here: http://www.bit.ly/cvA35T. In the meantime, three interesting things you’ll find in it’s pages:
1) Engagement with Facebook content doesn’t correlate with action for UNICEF-USA. The number of “likes” or comments on a posting do not have a strong relationship with the clickthrough rate for that posting. Since conversions – people completing the donation process – depend on clickthrough for UNICEF-USA, likes and comments aren’t strongly linked to donations, either. This is sure to be controversial, and we recommend that UNICEF-USA set up tests to confirm this finding and explore what the real implications are for long term giving.
2) More content isn’t better. On days that UNICEF-USA posted more than three times, their unsubscribe rate rose dramatically and clickthrough decreased. The exception to this rule was during the immediate aftermath of major natural disasters.
3) Wednesdays are the best days for clickthrough. Over eight months of data, Wednesday is consistently the best day of the week for UNICEF-USA’s clickthrough, regardless of the specific content.
Of course, the findings for your audience might be completely different, which is why we also recommend an approach to building your own measurement program. Check out the ebook here, and as always, let us know what you think!