Facebook Ads Part # 3

We are getting to the end of the three-day ad I ran on Facebook to promote the church's Palm Sunday service. At this point more than 25,000 people have seen the ad, usually in the context of their newsfeed. Out of that I've got 128 "clicks" on the ad, which would have taken them to the church's Facebook page. Out of that I've gotten about 30 "likes" of the page that weren't following before. If they continued the follow the funnel flow they would have landed on a page I designed on the church's website to specifically promote Holy Week. That's gotten approximately 25 views specifically from the Facebook Link (and it doesn't count people who might have found their way to that page some other way). Overall the traffic to the website has almost doubled since I started running the FB ad. And it only cost us $50. What I really can't wait to see is if all this translates into even ONE visitor tomorrow. If we do get one, will have been totally worth it. I can't wait to meet that person, by the way, and introduce them to our community.

The second observation I would make is that 41% of our traffic comes from referrals and the vast majority of them are from Facebook (though we do get a few from this blog and from the Diocese of Toronto's website). 29% comes from search traffic (mostly people Googling "Messiah Church Toronto") and 31% is people directly typing it "www.churchofthemessiah.ca" into their browser or clicking on a bookmark. This is fascinating, since if you had asked me before I started measuring I would have told you that most people come to our website through Google... not true. Facebook is having a huge impact.

Here's another interesting thing 26% of the people viewing the site are doing so on a mobile device (either a phone or a tablet). I think I would have guessed a bit low on that one, too. But it makes me thankful that I used a template that displays beautifully on mobile devices. You can even swipe the image slider on your mobile device and it works correctly.

So all of this has reconfirmed, for me, the importance of "feeding the beast" of content. Because drawing traffic to your site does no good if you don't have compelling content. And, what's even more important--that content needs to be developed more-or-less organically. It is misguided to do bait-and-switch. The content of the website needs to reflect accurately the life and character of the community. The low hanging fruit on the content tree is sermons. So I'm trying to get better about posting my sermons, regardless of how I felt about them when I preached them. I'm also trying not to get too crazy about doing nice production on them. Timeliness is very, very important. There is a quality threshold that stuff needs to meet, naturally, but then you just have to post, post, post.

As I write this I'm rendering a video of the sermon from Eleanor's funeral. I'll post it on the church's website and also cross-post it here when it's done.

Advertizing/Evangelism

For many years I've been creating posters and postcards and even vinyl banners to advertize for Holy Week at Messiah (and at St. Mary Magdalene's when I was there). Usually they get a few people to come, so I think they are totally worth doing. I've been more hesitant to do real Facebook campaigns, partly because I simply haven't felt like I've had the time. But this year I'm full of energy and enthusiasm, so I'm giving it a shot (and it doesn't hurt that I saw my friends at Church of the Transfiguration are trying a Facebook campaign!). Time for to give it a try. Target: Palm Sunday.

Step one: Create a "landing page" for the campaign. Since I'm targeting the "Open de-Churched" for this campaign, I wrote an article on the church's blog explaining what Palm Sunday is all about. This is purely an attractional approach, of course, and had in mind the sort of people who might remember going to church, but don't quite remember what Palm Sunday about or why it's different from the usual week. It's a bit "teachy," maybe, but this is just my first attempt at a Facebook campaign, so, it is what it is!

Step two: create a tracking tag for Google Analytics. Using this tool I created a custom tag to append to URL links that are part of the campaign. That way I can tell, later, how much of the traffic that lands on this page did so specifically because of the campaign (rather than simply because they Googled "What is Palm Sunday").

Step three: create a post on Facebook on the Church's page. (Not strictly necessary, of course, but helpful.) Now that post is only two sentences, but it has a link to the article I wrote in step one, along with a thumbnail image from that article. I set this post to go live at 10am. Scheduling is a good idea for two reasons: 1) having it publish during a high-traffic time on Facebook means that it will appear current in people's timelines, rather than hours old, and 2) I can make changes and make sure everything is solid before it goes live.

Step four: set up the Facebook ad. I won't walk you through this except to say that's very simple. You can set a "budget" for the campaign, but in the end they only charge you for the actual click-throughs of your ad. I'll also mention that I used the tracking tag created in step two, so this campaign will show up in Google Analytics and I'll be able to see how it compares to other efforts to bring traffic to the website. I also scheduled this to run from this morning (after the Facebook post goes public, naturally) until the service starts Palm Sunday morning. I also targeted it specifically to the GTA. I could have narrowed it down even further, say to people in certain age ranges, but this campaign is not that highly targeted. However, it probably won't be very long before you can create ads targeted toward people who like certain things that might lead me to think they would be open to attending a certain kind of church event, for example. That's coming.

This first attempt is a short run (three days) and not very expensive ($50). So I'll be curious to see the results. I'll be able to see how many people clicked through the ad and how many people stumbled onto the landing page from other sources. And if there are any visitors on Sunday I will simply ask them, as well, how they found us. A lot of time it's simply from walking or driving by the building, so I'm already thinking of ways we could maximize that.

Is there a difference between this advertizing work and evangelism? Not really. You'll see that I'm not pulling some kind of bait of switch, the post on the church website is quite confessional. I'm clearly inviting people to hear more about Jesus and His story. If that's not Evangelism I'm not sure what is!

#CHSOCM

One of the best ways to learn about Church and Social Media is to use Social Media to engage in conversations about Church and Social Media. There lots of people to follow on Twitter, Facebook, and other channels who share practical tips and inspire with examples of their work. There are also certain hash tags that are useful to keep tabs on. "Hash Tags" are those little bits of texts that start with a # key. People use them on Twitter to "tag" a tweet as belonging to certain subject. This is very useful, as it gives you a way to look up a subject and see what others are saying about, even if they aren't people you normally "follow."

One such hashtag is #CHSOCM which stands for "Church and Social Media." I can create a link that just searches for that term like this. Now that link is generated dynamically, meaning that what appeared when I wrote it just now is different what will appear when you click on it. And ten minutes later it might be different as more and more people add to the #CHSOCM tweets. Indeed, as I write this there are lots of tweets being added to that hashtag because there is a "Chat" happening right now that is using that hashtag.

That is, there are about two dozen or more people currently talking about Church and Social Media, as they do every Tuesday night at 9PM EST. This discussion is moderated, meaning that someone volunteers to lead the discussion with structured questions. Usually they announce the subject ahead of time, and sometimes even suggest people read certain things in order to discuss them. After the chat is over (which takes about an hour), the transcript is later uploaded as a kind of archive.

The nice thing about a chat like this is that it's somewhere between a phone call and an e-mail. Things are written down so you can always go back, but it's also very immediate and conversational. Topics ebb and flow as people make suggestions, share observations, and generally do the sort of things people do when talking.

Another thing I appreciate is that one can have one window open on their computer with the chat running, and use another for a task like creating blog posts!

Facebook Profiles turn out to be Accurate...

It's well known that people lie about themselves when they create on-line profiles for things like dating sites. Turns out, however, that Facebook is different...

[W]hen University of Texas researchers began studying Facebook friends, they expected that users also would exaggerate accomplishments and offer an enhanced version of themselves. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically gave an accurate and realistic impression of the user’s real-life personality. (source)

In this sense, Facebook is used more as a normal communications tool rather than as a means of self-promotion. How about that?

-t

Top 25 Things I Hate About Facebook

This will only make sense if you are on Facebook to begin with...


-t

Anglican Bloggers

The ever amusing Dave Walker has created a Facebook group for "Anglican Bloggers." He made this cartoon to illustrate...

They already have 278 members--though I doubt all of them have blogs! A quote from Dave:

By the way I have drawn the people in the cartoon wearing cassocks as I am assuming we all wear cassocks when blogging and commenting. In fact I tend to wear a dressing gown, which is a short cassock made from towelling material. (source)

I must admit that I don't usually wear a cassock while blogging, but I do usually wear slippers in the office, which are like dressing gowns but for feet.

-t

"Friends" IRL vs. Facebook

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Stategic vs. Crisis Management

Good staff meeting today. We are definitely making progress in getting away from a crisis-oriented way of running things and towards a strategic model. But, unfortunately, there is much progress to be made in various areas of the organization. The problem with making everything into a crisis that must be solved today is that it biases things towards the quick fix rather than the long term solution. It also tends to push people towards isolated "man-to-man" style defense rather than "zone-coverage." In other words, people tend to focus on problems to be addressed rather than their role in the process. When that happens, people start making decisions individually without seeing the larger picture.

The fact is that the only time you should intentionally lead with a crisis management model is when you have a genuine crisis to address. Alas, many churches (including SMM, for example) create cultures of perpetual crisis. Partly this happens because of a failure of strategic processes; partly it happens because crisis becomes a kind of drug that works as an institutional analgesic. It numbs people so that they don't feel the anxiety, pain, or loss associated with the "bigger picture." For example, churches in decline often get into a crisis-management culture as a way to avoid dealing with the reality that they are in decline. A healthier strategy is to actually address the real issues involved with some plan conceived of in a scale that matches the scale of the problem.

My general strategy at COTM at the moment is to get us out of the crisis-management place by putting in effective infrastructure that is structured around strategic goals. But that's much easier to do on the level of what happens in the building. Much harder when we are talking about coordinating volunteers. No wonder larger churches actually have a "volunteer manager" to help tame the chaos.

Still--we are making progress.

I set myself up on Facebook yesterday. That was very exciting. I've heard that most of the planning for youth events in the Diocese is done entirely in the Facebook universe.

Had a good lunch with a former parishioner at the ROM's new restaurant. The meal was pretty posh--and I do like a posh meal sometimes! I'm convinced that in a former life I was some kind of epicurean mad scientist. How else to explain my interest in fine dining and epistemology?

Speaking of epistemology--I've been doing some thinking and research about the most appropriate tools to do strategic thinking/planning at COTM. Today that meant learning about Ishikawa diagrams. This is a simple way of graphically organizing the root causes of a complex phenomenon. The first level branches could be populated with the 8 characteristics of growing churches according to the Natural Church Development project:

• Empowering Leadership
• Gift-based Ministry
• Passionate Spirituality
• Effective (Functional) Structures
• Inspiring Worship Service
• Holistic Small Groups
• Need-oriented Evangelism
• Loving Relationships.

Then you start to look at the ways that these characteristics contributed or harmed the effect we wish to examine (the declining attendance at COTM). The interesting thing about the NCD process, BTW, is that it focuses on core congregational health rather than church growth, per se.

Actually, there are number of tools from the literature on quality control that could be useful to us at COTM. For example, I'd love to do some scatter plots of things like length of time coming to COTM vs. length of Sunday drive, or how about involvement in congregational life vs. length of time coming to COTM, etc. Or even just a simple geographic scatter plot to show where people live. All attempts to get a better picture of the present circumstances....

Betsy made some flashcards to help us memorize the names and important facts about the congregation. I should make a resolution to spend at least an hour a day with them.

-t