Here’s an interesting tidbit from a recent FiveThirtyEight, Significant Digits Newsletter:

78 percent

A report from the research firm eMarketer found that Google and Facebook are solidifying and even expanding their dominance of the digital advertising market. Google will account for 78 percent of search ad revenue in 2017, while Facebook will get 39 percent of display ad revenue. Everyone else — including the newly public parent company of Snapchat — is fighting over the scraps. [Axios]

So what’s your social media marketing strategy? If Google and Facebook aren’t a significant part of your marketing program, you are likely to become a statistic, not the good kind either.

As a nonprofit organization there are a wealth of resources available to you develop a successful social media marketing plan.

Facebook

Facebook is an excellent way to deliver high-quality content to your patrons. A great way to start is to gather information from your CRM and upload it to Facebook. By using patron emails, Facebook will look to identify those patrons who are currently on Facebook and allow you to create an audience that you can use for messaging. Once you have created the audience you can then create look-alike audience of potential new patrons for targeted content boosts.

If you aren’t boosting your posts you are missing out on an opportunity to connect with a new audience. In a recent Facebook campaign one organization spent $250.00 and built a target audience through keywords, demographic profile and geography. The result for that investment was access to a new audience of 15,000 people resulting in approximately $5,000 in first time sales revenue.

Here’s a useful link on creating custom audiences: How do I create a Custom Audience from my customer file?

Here’s a useful link on creating Facebook ads: How do I create a Facebook ad?

Google

Google adWords are another area that nonprofit organizations can use as part of a successful digital marketing strategy. Through a grant from Google, qualifying nonprofit organizations can get up to $10,000 per month to spend on Google AdWords. Here’s a link to more information: Google AdGrants.
With Google and Facebook becoming so dominate in the digital advertising market nonprofits have a huge opportunity to drive content and patrons to their organizations.