Actscelerate.com

Is Social media advertising working for you?

Acts-celerater Posts: 935 **2/9/16 7:44 pm**

Do you advertise on Facebook? Do you actively place posts and boost them to advertise special events, meetings, speakers etc? If so, do you think it is working for you? How do you know if it is or not, do you track it?
Just wondering. We do a lot of it and I know it has raised our awareness among thousands of people ( mostly women from what I can tell) but I can't see that it is increasing traffic to our church. We are getting a lot of visits to our website and facebook pages but it doesn't seem to translate to people in the doors.
We have been doing this for several years now. We have abandoned Google advertising for Facebook but not sure we should have. Any of you have any history with this good or bad?

Acts Enthusiast Posts: 1865 **2/9/16 10:42 pm**

I don't post anything on FB but people in our church do. In my experience, it serves more to keep our people aware of what's going on and fosters a sense of community. I can't honestly say we have a lot of new guests who come as a result of Facebook. I believe it can actually work against you if you attempt to saturate people with ads for your church and invites to events. But that's simply my opinion.

Acts-celerater Posts: 935 **2/10/16 8:41 am**

Thanks for your response Mr Sheik. We use it to keep our people aware of events, weather closings etc which we dont boost (advertise) we do advertise a few special events and our major community outreaches. I don't think we overwhelm people but I could see how that might be annoying although there is so much content out there it is hard to get thru the noise sometimes. We boost spiritual thoughts as well occasionally and our usual response from the comments is postive. But we just aren't seeing much traffic in the doors.

Acts Enthusiast Posts: 1274 **2/10/16 8:47 am**

brother james

We use facebook and twitter but by far facebook has been the most benefit to us.
We do post all our services on YouTube and have received a pretty good following. If you are not using YouTube, I recommend it highly.

Thanks Wayne

Acts-celerater Posts: 935 **2/10/16 9:24 am**

We do use youtube and we have a good following on all of our social media platforms. We are live streaming some of our special services as well. However, what I think I am seeing is that in spite of all the following we have it is not bringing in a lot of new visitors in the doors. We track our visitors and few if any mark fb, yt as the reason for their visit, although perhaps they just aren't relating how they became aware of us to any special social media but it still might have been an underlying reason. Maybe even subliminal.
Just was wondering if social media is translating to actual people in the doors for anyone but maybe it's just one of many things that is hard to track quantitatively.

Re: Thanks Wayne

Acts Enthusiast Posts: 1274 **2/10/16 11:50 am**

Not a bad idea

Acts-celerater Posts: 935 **2/10/16 12:09 pm**

if you present it properly. It isn't costing us that much though and we use it as outreach but would like to obviously increase the numerical size of our weekly congregation and minister to them and thru them to our community.

On another note, there is a company called Causely.com http://www.causely.com/reach

which sells its services as a way to increase attendance especially to churches and more specifically to church plants using Facebook. For each like or share they donate a small amount of money to missions group. THe idea being to use your people to share these ads to their friends in order to get the word out and also to donate to a Christian mission organization. They seem to do well. No idea of the cost but it might be something to investigate. They don't reveal much on their website, they want you to call and listen to their sales pitch. Still, as they market it to church plants it couldn't cost too much and if it works might be worth checking out. Not sure if it's right for us but we might check it out.