How to Use Facebook for Evangelism

Have you ever used Facebook for evangelism and to connect with the community? If you haven’t, you need to jump into the game.

(make sure you keep reading to catch the cool story towards the bottom)

There are basically three different kinds of advertising you can do on Facebook.

The first is a targeted ad campaign. I wrote about my experience doing one for an evangelistic series here: The Surprising Results I Found When Reviewing a Special Report In Facebook. The premise of these is really simple. You create a small ad that will appear on someone’s sidebar on Facebook. In an age when less and less people are looking at handbills and mail that is sent to them, this is something that must be experimented with and tried.

The second kind of advertising on Facebook is when you “boost” a post. This option doesn’t appear on your personal profile, for example, but it will appear on the profile for your organization. Notice the red arrow on the picture below.

If you press that button, you’re given a chance to pay to have it promoted.

Finally, you can boost an event. Below is a pic of an event we boosted/promoted:

By doing this, we had people attend that would not have normally know about this. How much did I spend to advertise this event? $70. That’s it.

Cool story alert.

Now that I’ve said all that, let me tell you about an experience I had this past October using it for an event.

Last summer, we developed a new initiative at our church called GO: Projects. You might know that our mission statement is “Transforming this generation to Connect: Grow: Serve: Go.” The purpose of our GO: Projects is to go into the community and meet needs in practical ways.

For our first project of the school year, we decided to do one called “Free Hair Cuts for Kids.” We essentially had a fun fair and gave free haircuts to the students of our local public elementary school before their picture day. In a later post I’ll get into more details of what actually took place and how you could replicate it yourself.

Here was our problem, though. I had a dozen student barbers that were going to participate, but just a few days before the event, I discovered that only licensed barbers could participate in an event like this. In a last-ditch effort to salvage this event, I started personally canvassing barbers in our town. By the end of that day I had 4 barbers confirmed. I wanted to have 11. I was deflated and depressed.

“I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” I thought to myself. I was on the verge of calling the whole thing off. As I wallowed in failure, I thought about how horrible I felt.

And then I got the idea: Facebook.

Here is the actual Hail Mary post I put up on Facebook.

I paid $75 to advertise this. When you do an ad like this you can decide who you want to target it to, so I added the keywords of “barber” and “hairstylist.” I also selected for this to be shown only to barbers within a 15 mile radius of where the event was taking place.

What happened?

Within minutes this boosted post began to appear in people’s timeliness as a sponsored event.

It was shared 49 times.

We had 81 comments. You can see all the comments here. People started coming forward. By the end of it, we had more people step forward than we could actually use.

What’s the lesson? Take advantage of the targeted advertising that Facebook offers. It’s an inexpensive way to advertise to people around you.

So what about you? Have you ever used Facebook or other social media to advertise? What results did you see? To leave a comment scroll below or click here.

[image by mkhmarketing]