The Rev. David Keill of Christ Ascension, Richmond, writes on the Church’s experience of using paid advertising on Facebook for its Vacation Bible School. He placed two ads with various results, including this summary:
The picture post advertising Vacation Bible School has done much better, with different actions being taken. As of today, the ad has been running for four days and we have had 3 people like the Christ Ascension page. In addition, we have had 10 people like the photo itself. For me, this is 13 post engagements. In the ad data that Facebook gives you, however, Facebook claims that there have been 50 post engagements. When you go to the Facebook help glossary, the definition of what exactly a post engagement is, is not very clear and there are a lot of people complaining about that on the boards and not getting a good response from Facebook.
Two Observations:
1. No one has signed up their kid for Vacation Bible School, so the ad has not yet been successful in that regard. However, we are clearly getting a lot of exposure in other ways. Whether or not it translates to people showing up at church remains to be seen.
2. A good goal here is to get people to “like” the Christ Ascension page itself, since once they do that, they will receive all of our free posts until they decide to “unlike” the page.
Read his whole article in DIODOCS: A Resources Blog for Clergy & Lay Leaders in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.