When planning how you will recruit new blood donors (especially younger donors), social media is a given when it comes to strategy. Two great platforms we always recommend are Facebook and Snapchat because we’ve seen great success for our clients and know they’ll work for other blood centers too!
We have other blog posts sharing the benefits and why you should already be on these platforms (like this blog sharing how Snapchat brings in younger donors), but this blog will just be sharing the differences between Facebook and Snapchat so you have all the information needed to prioritize social media campaigns.
Custom Audience Targeting
Facebook: Offers a comprehensive range of attributes for audience matching, including first name, last name, city, state, date of birth, email, phone, age, and country.
Snapchat: Allows only a phone number or email address for audience matching, which typically results in smaller audiences compared to Facebook.
Ad Types:
Facebook: Provides a variety of ad formats such as carousels, collections, images, and videos.
Snapchat: Offers limited options with image and video ads.
Donor Usage:
Facebook: Boasts a massive user base of 2 billion daily users.
Snapchat: Has over 400 million daily users.
Before going straight to choosing the platform with the most users, consider the availability and target demographics of your donors on each platform when planning your social media strategy.
Demographics:
Facebook: Approximately 75% of the donor audiences is 35+
Snapchat: Approximately 75% of the donor audience is 34 and under (Gen Z and Millennials)
Audience Reporting and Insights:
Both platforms offer extensive reporting, but Snapchat provides valuable audience insights that can inform future ad content.
Engagement:
Facebook: Allows various ways for donors to engage with ads, including comments, reactions, shares, and page likes.
Snapchat: Offers a single engagement option – clicking through to the landing page.
Existing Profile:
Facebook: Your blood center must have an existing and active Facebook page to begin advertising
Snapchat: Does not require an existing profile.
Psychographics:
Snapchat provides psychographic information about donors and their top interests, which Facebook lacks.
Ad Creation:
Facebook: Doesn’t provide templates for ad creation
Snapchat: Offers customizable templates within its ads manager
Advantage +:
Facebook: Offers various 'Advantage +' features, including campaign budget distribution, audience optimization, and creative optimization.
Snapchat: Features an audience expansion tool and allows the smooth publishing of multiple ads to multiple ad sets.
Number of Ads per Ad Set:
Facebook: Max number of ads is 50
Snapchat: Max number of ads is 100
Access to Deleted Ads
Facebook: Although Facebook only allows 50 ads per ad set, it’s not a huge deal, because even if you delete an ad to make room for another one in the campaign, you’re still able to access the data
Snapchat: Once an ad is deleted, you can’t access performance data
There you have it! We hope that this comparison between Facebook and Snapchat was helpful in determining how you want to implement them for your blood donor recruitment campaign. As always, if you have more questions about the platforms and our specific recommendations for your blood center, fill out our Let’s Talk form and we’ll be more than happy to help.