Engaging More Blood Donors With Facebook

1.39 billion people per month use Facebook, with the average daily time spent on the social network totalling 40 minutes. Blood centers not only need to be using Facebook, but need to be using it in a strategic way to make the greatest impact.

Below you'll find five ways your organization could, and should, be using Facebook to engage and recruit more blood donors.

Facebook Posts

Most blood centers have created a Facebook company page and many publish somewhat frequently. Some interact with their donors extremely well while others fail to truly engage them.

While every audience is unique, there are some best practices when it comes to posting on Facebook:

  • Posts published between 10pm and 11pm receive 88% more interactions
  • Posts with an image receive 179% more interactions than the average Facebook post
  • Posts ending with a question get 162% more interactions 
  • Videos are the most shared type of content on Facebook
  • Sunday is the best day to post - they get 52.9% more interactions than the average post

Take a look at these and more Facebook statistics here

Sponsored Ads

As the Facebook algorithm continues to change, organic reach for the average company page has dropped to 6.5% and continues to decrease year after year. Because of this, blood centers must opt to boost and/or sponsor some of their more important posts. 

The good news is that Facebook Ads are fairly inexpensive and produce some of the best ROI compared to any other social network. By paying as little as $5, your blood center can engage more of their fans, more of their fans friends, or more of any other designated target audience. 

Custom Audiences

One of those target audiences could be custom audiences. Facebook allows users to upload lists of existing customer email addresses in order to be hashed, matched against Facebook's data, and added as a custom audience. Blood centers can then use their custom audiences to recruit only the donor types they need. By uploading a list of O donors for example, a blood center can pay to have a sponsored post delivered to just those donors.

This type of targeting is easy in tele-recruiment, email, direct mail, etc., but up until now, has been much more difficult online. This targeting feature changes everything and allows blood centers to become much more strategic with their recruitment of blood donors.

Facebook Live

People spend 3x longer watching video which is Live compared to video that is no longer Live.  On top of that, every time you start live streaming on Facebook, your followers get a notification. What could be better than publishing a post that all of your fans are instantly notified of?

While live video streaming can be more difficult to pull off, it truly does engage donors more than any other type of content. But since Cisco is predicting that by 2020, traffic from online videos will constitute over 80% of all consumer internet traffic globally, we must all make this a priority in our social and recruitment strategies going forward. 

Retargeting

According to the retargeting service Adroll, only 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store… With retargeting, we can engage the other 98%. Blood banks can use retargeting ads to boost the chances of converting website visitors into donors later on. 

By setting up a Facebook pixel on your website, your blood center can increase the value of every person that clicks through to its website by retargeting them with additional Facebook ads with higher conversion rates.  Your blood center's message will appear within the visitor's Facebook timeline, allowing you to stay top of mind, increasing the chances that the visitor will go back to your site and schedule a donation.

No matter your budget, using Facebook more strategically will enable your blood center to engage and recruit more blood donors.