Making new friends: How Rocky Mountain PBS increased our Facebook fan base by 220% in a year

by Aaron Hoffman, Development Officer and Social Media Manager at Rocky Mountain PBS

A little over a year ago, the Rocky Mountain PBS Facebook Page was hovering at about 2000 fans and was posting 4-5 times per week. We embarked on a new strategy to jump-start our social media presence, and received a challenge from management to increase our fan base to 5000. This wasn’t a “magic number”, but it would bring us more in line with the Facebook numbers seen in comparable markets.  

In essence, we utilized a number of free or very inexpensive methods to drastically increase our following, but we also found a small, highly-targeted paid Sponsored Stories ad campaign to be very effective. 

The “Increase activity and post quality” way

We used a number of different strategies to increase our visibility and engagement on Facebook

• We learned to post photos as much as possible (they get waaaay more screen real estate than link thumbnails on both mobile and desktop devices), and almost always get more engagement than links. Example:
• We began to post more often (at least 2x per day)
• We experimented with switching up the time of day that we posted (not just business hours)
•  If we had trouble coming up with content, we found it’s easy and effective to share PBS, PBS Kids, PBS Digital Studios, or other content in the “PBS Ecosystem” 
• We worked on keeping our posts short and sweet.

We began to group our posts into general categories that we found effective:

• Program reminders (the majority of people who follow PBS on social media do so for program reminders)
• Nostalgia/trivia. Most of our fans probably grew up watching PBS content, so nostalgia is a great way to engage them (did you know Oscar used to be orange and Grover was originally grayish green?)
• Acknowledge that you’re in the social media space. If you cross the 2000 fan mark, celebrate and draw attention to it!
• Track your success. Track some basic social media stats in a spreadsheet, or actually look at Facebook Insights from time to time!

·         What didn’t work for us? Sweepstakes and contests. We tried both, using third party apps (running a sweepstakes using Facebook itself is a violation of their terms of service and could resort in a revocation of the account). Despite what we felt were very cool giveaways (personal voicemail greetings by FRONTLINE narrator Will Lyman, cooking gift baskets, tickets to see Temple Grandin live, tickets to see the premiere of “Pearl Jam Twenty”), contests never really worked for us. We’re holding off on this technique

These are all great ways to increase Facebook engagement and fan base. But after nearly a year, we still had 1300 fans to go to meet our goal of 5000. We decided to try something different.

The “Facebook ad campaign” way

After speaking with Kevin Dando at the PBS Annual Meeting in May, we became interested in a paid “Sponsored Stories” campaign that PBS used to increase their fan base. A sponsored story is an ad, but it doesn’t look like a traditional ad. It’s subtle. It harnesses the power of friendships and shows a user that their friend(s) like our Page. People trust their friends and will often like what their friends like, which is what makes this campaign so effective. Here’s an example of what a Sponsored Story looks like:

With some help from Kevin and the PBS rep at Facebook, we allocated a few hundred dollars of our advertising budget to give this a try. Here’s how we targeted it:

• Audience: all of Colorado (Rocky Mountain PBS is a statewide network),
•  People who already Liked PBS and other public media, but didn’t already Like Rocky Mountain PBS, and
•  People whose friends already Liked Rocky Mountain PBS

When you set up a Facebook ad campaign, you have the option to set your own daily budget. We selected one that worked for us (the minimum is $1 per day).

It took a few days to ramp up, but once it did, it really ran. The results? We went from 3710 fans to 6475, a 75% increase. In less than 5 weeks!

My suspicion is that many people within a station’s viewing area may already Like PBS and other public media, but they don’t necessarily Like the station that brings this beloved content to them. Our campaign was a great way to help pull some of the people who already love PBS into the folds of Rocky Mountain PBS. Because of the success of this campaign, and because we still believe we have room to grow, we are continuing to use Sponsored Stories (though at a lower daily budget). 

All of the above techniques would be easy for any station to use by ramping up their Facebook presence using some of the tips we provided, and by replicating a similar Sponsored Stories campaign to fit their geographic area and budget. Questions? Contact me at aaronhoffman AT rmpbs DOT org or @AaronHoffman_ on Twitter. And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook!