How do I get more Facebook followers for my non profit?
How many followers do you have? How many followers do you want?
Many of the marketing managers and fundraisers I talk to place huge importance on this metric. A big number sounds important right?
Let me say upfront that it's not as important as it sounds - it's better to have a small, engaged audience of people who spread the word about what you do and donate to support you, than hundreds of thousands of people who scroll on past.
That being said, if you rely on your organic social media to bring in donations, part of your strategy should be focused on growing your audience of interested people. If no-one knows about you, no-one can support you. That means:
engaging with other relevant accounts
having conversations in the comments and DMs
using relevant hashtags
posting interesting, relatable content that your audience will want to share.
Remember - it's ok to ask your audience to follow you in some of your posts. Those who aren't already following you are interested enough to read your post so a little call to action can nudge them into committing to a follow, and from there you can nurture them with your drip-drip of emotionally connecting content.
You can also use paid ads to boost your numbers. Paid social will significantly increase your ability to reach and speak to new audiences, so when you plan your ads make sure you are giving people a flavour of what you do and why they should follow you to find out more. If you have audience targeting in place that you know works well for you you may not even need to warm the audience up first - but test and see what works for you.
Paid social also allows you to retarget existing audiences, like your past donors, website visitors and newsletter subscribers. The benefit of this is that bringing these people into your social audiences gives you more opportunities to talk to them, and helps keep you front of mind.
One more reminder - these numbers only matter if increased followers means increased volunteers / donations / enquiries coming in. Nurturing the followers you have is just as important as growing those numbers, if not more, so make sure you're posting consistently and engaging the followers you already have.