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How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Facebook?
CHAPTER 6
How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Facebook? At the dawn of the new millennium, The Gap was a rising retail megastar. The clothing outlet founded by Doris and Don Fisher in 1969 after Don could not find a pair of jeans that fit had an impressive history of growth. Over 30 years, The Gap had diversified, acquiring Banana Republic as well as creating GapKids and Old Navy (Gap Inc., 2016). They opened 570 stores across three continents in just 1999 alone (Gap Inc., 1999) and by the end of that year, Gap Inc. had rung up a stunning 11.6 billion dollars in net sales (Gross, 2006). The real power of The Gap in 1999, however, laid in their ability to shape culture. In the 1990s, The Gap’s cache was that they produced quality but affordable clothing that both celebrities and everyday people wore. Popular advertisements featured rapper LL Cool J wearing Gap baggy jeans, writer Joan Didion and her daughter wearing turtlenecks, and choreographed routines performed by a diverse group of gorgeous models/dancers all donning Gap t-shirts and khakis (Kim, 2015). Business writer Daniel Gross noted just how much of a hold the brand had over people’s fashion choices: “The Gap influenced the way people dressed— remember the unfortunate jeans and light-blue work-shirt period when yuppies outfitted themselves like dock hands?” (para. 2). Thus, the real power of The Gap was in their ability to shape the world beyond fashion. The Gap did not just sell clothing, they sold an aspirational lifestyle with the ads implying that anyone who wore The Gap clothing could be like the featured celebrities and models (Spivack, 2013). In 1999, The Gap was at the pinnacle of their success and the social media platform Facebook is experiencing a similar moment in their own history. Like The Gap, Facebook has a history of expansion and shaping the world beyond their own industry. Unlike The Gap, change is at the heart of Facebook’s operations. While Facebook’s fundamental attributes of status updates and likes allow libraries to craft fundraising ads and appeals, the extent to which Facebook can adapt to meet the changing needs of their users will determine how valuable the platform is for libraries and Fundraising DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102003-6.00006-8
Copyright © 2018 Joyce V. Garczynski. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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their fundraising efforts. The ever-present change that underlies the platform means that libraries must be willing to adapt their fundraising strategies to Facebook’s changing platform if they want to be successful.
FACEBOOK’S HISTORY OF GROWTH AND CHANGE In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University (Vargas, 2010). Originally called “the facebook” after the staff and student profile pages that Harvard handed out to first year students (Phillips, 2007), it was simply a directory of individual profiles that users can update (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Within 24 h, 1200 Harvard students had signed up (Phillips, 2007) and within a month, Zuckerberg expanded the platform to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford (Schneider, 2004). In August 2005, the facebook became just Facebook after the domain was purchased for 200,000 dollars and in September 2006, the platform became freely available to anyone with an e-mail address and revenue was expected to come from advertisements (Phillips, 2007). Over time, Facebook steadily grew by expanding the user base of the platform. In 2007, MySpace was the dominant social media platform, boasting about 100,000 unique worldwide visitors per month compared to Facebook’s 40,000 (Arrington, 2008). Facebook, nevertheless, continued to add new users while MySpace languished and by 2008 Facebook became the dominant global social media platform (Arrington, 2008). How was Facebook able to expand while MySpace faltered? Some analysts point to problems at MySpace, such as controlling corporate leadership by their new owner NewsCorp (Hartung, 2011), or the platform’s decision to allow users to design their own space which created “a wasteland of cluttered and annoying pages” (Kelleher, 2010, para. 7). It was really Facebook’s ability to learn from MySpace’s missteps, however, that allowed Facebook to flourish. Facebook opted for a cleaner, more streamlined design than MySpace which appealed to a broader audience and allowed them to grow their user base (Kelleher, 2010). Also, Facebook was open to change their platform’s features based on user feedback. “The brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg was his willingness to allow Facebook to go wherever the market wanted it. Farmville and other social games—why not?...The founders kept pushing the technology to do anything users wanted” (Hartung, 2011, para. 5). It has been Facebook’s willingness to change their platform that has allowed them to grow their user base and shape worldwide information consumption. When Facebook celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2014,
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technology writer Kate Knibbs chronicled how the platform’s design had undergone at least some change every year except 2012, the same year that they bought Instagram and became a publically traded company. In some years the alterations were minor, such as adding new features like video in 2007 (Knibbs, 2014), but in other years Facebook made more substantial changes. For example, Facebook added the News Feed in 2006 allowing users to automatically see other’s status updates every time they logged into the platform (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Many of the changes that Facebook would make over the years would be related to how status updates are arranged on the News Feed. In 2009, Facebook went from displaying status updates in chronological order to prioritizing popular posts (those that received the most engagement such as receiving lots of likes) (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Ever since that change was made in 2009, Facebook has been tweaking their algorithm in an effort to provide users with the content they want to see at the top of their News Feed. All told, between their founding in 2004 and the end of 2016, Facebook has changed what the platform does or how information is displayed on the platform over 35 times (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Users have not always welcome all of this change. In 2008 when Facebook transformed the News Feed into the Wall and in 2011 when they transformed the Wall into the Timeline, some users threatened to leave if Facebook did not rollback these dramatic changes (Knibbs, 2014). In both instances, Facebook stuck with the changes and then moved on to make even more. Why does Facebook change their platform so much? Writing for Slate, Oremus (2016) argues that Facebook changes so much because the intelligence behind the platform is human and humans are not always predictable beings. Business reporter Adam Hartung (2011) has a less existential explanation: changes allow the company to expand. “If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen. . .And looking within the comments for what would be the . . . next revision that would lead to more uses, more users and more growth” (para. 5). Facebook has grown substantially over time, becoming by far the largest social media platform. As of September 2016, Facebook has an average of 1.18 billion daily active users with almost 85% of those daily active users coming from outside the United States and Canada (Facebook, 2016b). With such an extensive user base, Facebook has influenced how everyone communicates and as a result, shaped culture and history. On a most basic level, Facebook changed language, adding value to terms such
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as “like” and “share” as well as transforming “friend” into a verb (Elgot, 2015). This change in terminology has had a powerful impact on offline relationships as well. Because Facebook makes staying connected relatively easy, friendships that might have once dissipated when one party moves can now live on despite geographic separation (della Cava, 2014). In addition, all friends, whether they be your best friend from childhood or that person you worked with for 5 months in 2010, are now on equal footing (Elgot, 2015) and it is up to a frequently-changing algorithm to determine to what extent you will see what those friends have to say. Facebook’s ability to change language has shaped how we behave and even impacted historical events. From finding friends with common interests, to playing games, to shopping, almost every aspect of a user’s social life can be conducted through the Facebook platform and that is how Facebook has designed it to be. “Facebook knows what you like. . .Advertisers may butter Facebook’s bread, but its most pressing interest of all is in keeping its users coming back for more. If it ever fails at that, its advertising business will implode” (Oremus, 2014, para. 3). One area of users’ lives that Facebook has significantly impacted has been news consumption, with a greater percentage turning to the platform to find out what is happening in their world. According to the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit research center in the United States, 62% of Americans said that they get their news from social media and 66% of Facebook users say they get their news from the platform (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). This means that Facebook has the power to control what information the public sees and as a result, how they understand the world around them. For instance, after the 2016 US Presidential election, numerous political pundits criticized Facebook for allowing fake news to circulate on their platform and possibly influencing the outcome of the election (Romano, 2016). This was bolstered by an investigation by Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, who found that fake news on Facebook garnered thousands more likes and shares than stories from legitimate outlets (Romano, 2016). CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to this controversy by posting that “less than one percent of all content on the site could be classified as ‘fake news and hoaxes’” (Romano, 2016, para. 1) but the platform was willing to take some steps, such as working with third-party fact checkers, to help improve accuracy (Smith, 2016). Ultimately Zuckerberg said that whatever changes Facebook implements to address their fake news problem, they do not want to discourage users from
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sharing their opinions on the platform (Smith, 2016). Although many activists were disappointed in Zuckerberg’s initial response, his position is not surprising because it is in-line with Facebook’s goals of continuing to expand the platform while still remaining true to the social medium’s fundamental attributes.
FACEBOOK FUNDAMENTALS: STATUS UPDATES, LIKES, AND CHANGE Even though change is at the heart of Facebook, the platform does have two additional fundamental attributes, status updates and likes, that play a role in determining what content is effective on the platform. Libraries can look to businesses to see how they have used these attributes in their posts and incorporate some of these same techniques into their own fundraising efforts.
Status Updates Even though they were not a part of Facebook’s initial 2004 design and they have evolved into paid ads for organizations, the concept of sharing a status update has become a fundamental attribute of the platform. Facebook launched status updates at the same time as they launched the News Feed in September 2006, and these two innovations transformed the platform from a directory to a social media platform that allowed users to easily keep up to date with what other users were doing. These early status updates really were not magnificent works of art; they were mostly people announcing that they had joined the platform and trying to figure out how it all worked. For example, in honor of Facebook’s 10th anniversary, the staff of the online magazine TNW shared their first status updates in 2007 which included simply saying “at home” to a more complex musing of “How the hell does Facebook work? What’s this for? MySpace is so much simpler. . .” (Bryant, 2014, para. 7, 8). As Facebook grew, users began sharing more and more of their lives on the platform and their status updates became more personal and more meaningful. In fact, a 2015 study found that couples who make their dating relationships “Facebook official”—they have declared their relationship on the platform—show an increase in commitment to the relationship and are more likely to still be together 6 months after going official than those couples that did not go official (Toma & Choi, 2015).
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With more and more people and organizations posting more and more status updates, users’ News Feeds became crowded so Facebook decided to prioritize popular posts so users would not miss the content they wanted to see. This change to an algorithm-driven feed coupled with Facebook’s subsequent history of tweaking that algorithm according to user feedback meant that organizations had to become a whole lot more thoughtful with what they posted and how they posted if they wanted it to be seen by potential customers. Even still, Facebook continued to grow and by 2014 organizations began to see a real decline in who they could reach with free posts (known as organic reach). According to marketing firm Ogilvy, Facebook began restricting the organic reach of posts made by brands to around 16% in 2012 and the decline continued to an average of 6.15% in February 2014 (Manson, 2014). This meant that out of every 100 people who liked an organization’s Facebook page, only 6 of those people would even see the post. This kind of decline led analysts to declare organic reach as being dead and left brands and other organizations with little choice but to buy advertisements on Facebook if they wanted to reach their followers. Ads have become big business at Facebook. In the third-quarter of 2016, Facebook made approximately 6.8 billion dollars from advertising on their platform (Facebook, 2016d) and by 2020, Facebook and Google are poised to take 71% of the United Kingdom’s online ad revenue ( Jackson, 2016). So what can organizations do to get their ads noticed on Facebook? According to experts, the key is to return to Facebook’s roots of the status update in order to create ad content that looks and feels like a well-crafted status update from a personal friend. On a basic level, analysts recommend keeping the text to a minimum—most ads only use 5 words in the headline and just 14 words in the post text (Tate, 2015)— and including either an image or a video which is more likely to be remembered and shared (Bernazzani, 2015). Beyond that, however, the key to an effective ad on Facebook is to use the text and images/videos to tell a compelling story to a targeted audience and an example of this is Salem Five Bank’s bank happily ever after ads. Their campaign began with a Carousel Ad (a series of captioned images) of happy couples and the post text of “You found the person you love. It’s time to love your checking account. Answer 2 questions about your life, and bank happily ever after” (Berk, 2016, para. 8). Each of the images in the Carousel Ad was captioned with a few words about an applicable bank service, including a picture of a couple in front of the Eiffel Tower captioned, “If it’s
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Time for an Adventure. . .Free ATMs worldwide” (Berk, 2016, para. 8). These ads were so compelling because they were not only selling convenient banking options during a busy time for the couple, but they were also selling the couples a status update of a happy, fun-filled engagement.
Likes Just like status updates, likes were not part of the original Facebook interface. But ever since they were added in 2007, the ability to give a thumbs up or like another user’s status update has changed the way users engage with the content on the platform and as a result, liking has become a fundamental attribute of Facebook. Initially when Facebook engineers were designing a way for users to more easily and clearly react to posts than to comment, they developed a prototype of an “awesome button,” but scrapped that in favor of a like button because like is a more universal emotion (Bosworth, Goldman, & McMillen, 2014). The thought was that this new paring of liking and commenting would be similar to rating and reviewing a restaurant online, with liking being equivalent to giving the restaurant five stars and commenting being equivalent to writing a detailed review about what was so wonderful about the restaurant (Chan, 2009). Initially Facebook executives feared that the presence of like button would diminish user comments on the site, but early tests showed that the presence of the like button actually increased the number of comments a post received (Bosworth et al., 2014). Thus, the like button helped increase user engagement on Facebook which helped make the platform more appealing to advertisers. Although the addition of a like button may have seemed like serendipity for Facebook, Communication professor Robert W. Gehl (2013) contends that advertising research conducted before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook suggested that such an innovation would be successful. In the early 1990s, the Advertising Research Foundation’s “Copy Research Validity Project” took a look at what features determined whether or not an advertisement would increase revenues and they found that “of all the measures, ‘likability’ was the surprise winner” (Gehl, 2013, para. 5). In other words, the more people like something, the more they want to interact with it and buy it (Gehl, 2013). The ability to like posts on Facebook not only influences users’ buying habits, it shapes the content on the platform as well as how users present themselves. Facebook keeps track of every single post and page
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that a user likes and uses that information along with other activities on the social medium to determine what posts that user will see (Oremus, 2016) and to predict what other content that user would like to see (Kelly, 2013). The impact of the like on how a user experiences the platform played out in a series of experiments in 2014. When Mat Honan (2014) liked everything he encountered on the platform for 48 h, he ended up with a News Feed that feel foreign and downright meaningless to him. This contrasts with Elan Morgan’s (2014) experiment to stop liking anything at all on Facebook which resulted in her getting more of the content she actually wanted to see, rather than just more extreme versions of the content she had liked. Both experiments suggest that liking alters how users experience Facebook and as a result, how users interact with the world around them. Researchers have found that users tend to present their best selves on Facebook and other social platforms, sharing information or images that they believe other users will like and will enhance those other users’ perceptions (Bareket-Bojmel, Moran, & Shahar, 2016). In extreme cases, there is a wide gap between a user’s authentic self and the self that person shares on social media (Gil-Or, Levi-Belz, & Turel, 2015). This is problematic because having a false Facebook-self is associated with low self-esteem and “can serve as a gateway issue to more problematic behaviors which may lead to psychological problems and even pathologies, such as Facebook addiction” (Gil-Or et al., 2015, p. 9). Even though liking can have negative consequences for certain individuals on the platform, liking has proven to be such a boon for Facebook that they resisted expanding it to other emotions for almost 10 years. Users have requested a dislike option for years, arguing that like is “binary and unequivocal” and they did not have an option for reacting to tragic news on the platform (Luckerson, 2015, para. 4). In 2016 Facebook added Reactions, a series of five additional emotion choices ranging from love to anger that a user can place on another user’s post, but refused to add a dislike option (Lafferty, 2016). Robert Gehl predicted in 2013 that Facebook would not institute a dislike button because like was too good for business and Zuckerberg confirmed this in 2014 by saying, “I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives” (Lafferty, 2016, para. 5). Since positivity sells on Facebook, it is no wonder that marketers have embraced it in their advertising campaigns on the platform. An analysis of
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over 35,000 Facebook advertisements found that when ads do have a valence, it tends to be slightly positive with ads including words like yummy and win (Tate, 2015). A successful example of this is e-commerce platform Shopify’s ads targeted at acquiring new merchants. Shopify launched a series of visual ads on Facebook that coupled beautiful photos of crafted objects with aspirational language like “What’s stopping you?” (Shewan, 2016, para. 30). Also by including a link directing users to where they could get started selling their crafts, Shopify was able to acquire new merchants for 10 times less than with these Facebook posts than with paid search advertisements (Facebook, 2016c). Thus, liking is an enduring attribute on Facebook that continues to drive successful content on the platform.
Change As described earlier, change has played a significant role in Facebook’s history. Since the platform and/or the algorithm driving the News Feed are evolving to meet user demands, change can really be considered a fundamental attribute of the platform. This means that it is advantageous for organizations seeking to share content on the platform to stay informed about updates to the platform and adapt their communications strategies accordingly if they want to be successful. A good example of how a practice has evolved on Facebook is the use of hashtags. Facebook first introduced hashtags on their platform back in 2013, after they had already become a strong presence on other social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram (Hutchinson, 2016). When Facebook (2013) introduced hashtags they encouraged marketers to use them, saying that deploying them on Facebook would amplify campaigns on other channels that are already using hashtags. Once they were released, marketing bloggers began to recommend best practices for organizations using hashtags in their Facebook campaigns. In addition, hashtags on Facebook received a boost when major corporations such as Starbucks, Major League Baseball, and Cover Girl were all designed advertising campaigns built around this new feature and achieved some initial marketing success (Washenko, 2013). After a while though, the tide began to turn against hashtags when researchers uncovered that the median reach on viral posts was higher for posts without hashtags than posts with them (Owano, 2013). Ultimately, marketers have moved on to the next Facebook development and many like Francisco Rosales
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of the blog “Social Mouths” now recommend using hashtags “in very specific cases like an event or a promotion, with the proper support of other media”(Hutchinson, 2016, para. 25). The example of hashtags on Facebook demonstrates how organizations who are early adopters of new features on the social media platform can use those new features, for a limited time, to achieve promotional success. If you take a look at Facebook for Business’ Success Stories, most of the case studies presented have taken advantage of a new development in Facebook technology to achieve their success. For instance, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority used Facebook’s new 360 video feature to attain a 16% click through rate on their Facebook advertisements (Facebook, 2016a). Thus, the key to marketing success on Facebook seems to be keeping up with new developments on the platform, being willing to experiment with new features, and being willing to change marketing practices as new developments happen on the platform.
CRAFTING FUNDRAISING APPEALS FOR FACEBOOK When it comes to fundraising on Facebook, libraries should keep in mind the fundamental attributes of the platform and look to model the successful practices employed by other businesses, nonprofits, and other libraries. By strategically crafting and boosting status updates that are visually compelling, keep text to a minimum, and are likeable, as well as taking advantage of Facebook’s newest features, libraries can successfully reach potential donors on the platform.
Strategic Storytelling Status Updates The first step to creating successful fundraising content on Facebook is to determine what the library’s goals are. There are lots of options such as increasing engagement in preparation for a future ask, receiving a set amount of contributions for a particular project, or thanking donors in order to maintain a relationship with them, just to name a few. Whatever the goal, it is a good idea to outline it first and then determine how successful completion of the goal will be defined. (There will be more about assessment of fundraising efforts in Chapter 10: How Can Libraries Determine Success?.) When setting the goal, it also is important to keep in mind what resources are required to achieve that goal. Given the apparent death of organic reach on Facebook discussed earlier, libraries will most likely have to follow the lead of other nonprofit organizations and strategically pay for advertisements if they want their fundraising
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content to be seen by their target audience. An example of successful nonprofit advertising content on Facebook was Project Healing Waters’ advertisement in late 2015. Two weeks ahead of Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday following Thanksgiving in the United States when nonprofit organizations focus on fundraising, Project Healing Waters spent 30 dollars to promote their page (Ragland, 2016). Their ad contained a simple description about the organization’s mission, a link to their Facebook page, and a compelling image related to the work of the nonprofit (Ragland, 2016). Because of this ad, Project Healing Waters acquired 621 new page likes and when Giving Tuesday came, the organization did not have to boost their post on that day because those who newly liked the page saw the fundraising appeal organically (Ragland, 2016). Using this strategy and others, Project Healing Waters ultimately was able to raise 15,000 dollars on Giving Tuesday (Ragland, 2016). When crafting fundraising content for Facebook, libraries should follow the example of successful organizations’ marketing on the platform. Posts should tell a likeable story and contain a visual, either a graphic, image, or video that supports the story. The nonprofit Habitat for Humanity does this well; they post progress pictures of the houses that they are building and they include the stories of their volunteers and the families they help as well (Havlat, n.d.). These types of posts encourage followers to keep checking their News Feeds for updates and they add a personal element to the narrative that the organization is telling on Facebook about the work that they do (Havlat, n.d.). These storytelling posts can then be coupled with an ask for contributions and a link to the organization’s giving site or directions for how someone can give. The Make a Wish Foundation has frequently used this approach in their fundraising posts (Haider, 2012). In the past, they have posted an ask for contributions—“By 11:59 p.m. today, we need to raise $7,500 to Adopt-A-Wish. For as little as $1, you can help grant a wish for a child with a life-threatening illness” (Haider, 2012, para. 8)—and then linked to their giving page which briefly tells the story of the first wish that the foundation granted. Libraries can replicate this approach on their own Facebook pages by visually telling the story of a user who have benefitted from one of their services (such as help finding a job) and ending the post with an ask for contributions and a link to the website where someone can support that service. Another possibility is for libraries to tell the stories of the items in their collections and couple those posts with an ask for a contribution to support that collection. The British Library has done this well on their Facebook page; they have posted a photo of and a description about the
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progress they are making on conserving a significant item, such as Elizabeth I’s prayer book, and they ended the post with an ask for contributions, such as “Make a donation today and help us preserve more treasures,” and a link to their donations page (British Library, 2016). These visual storytelling posts coupled with an ask for contributions can help libraries showcase their value and provide their followers with an easy way to support that value.
Facebook Changes Just as corporations have been able to take advantage of Facebook’s changing features to reach their intended audiences, libraries can do this as well with their efforts to build support if they are willing and able to experiment with the new features on the platform. As described in the Case Study at the end of this chapter, Pima County Public Library in Arizona has done this well through their use of Facebook Events. Also, some of Facebook’s most recent updates are efforts to make fundraising easier on the platform. In the second half of 2016, Facebook added Fundraisers, a tool that allows individual users to set up fundraising campaigns for US charities that the platform has vetted. Eligible libraries may want to consider experimenting with this feature and any future fundraising developments on the medium because Facebook has two good reasons to do everything in their power to help nonprofits successfully fundraise on their platform—they stand to gain both users and money. Currently only 3% of the online traffic going to charities’ websites comes from social media (Abramovich, 2015). Thus, if Facebook can convince users to go to them instead of Google to find a reputable charity, they will be able to grow their user base. Also, Facebook is taking 5% of all the revenue raised through Fundraisers so if fundraising is successful on the platform, it can prove to be a lucrative revenue stream for them as well (Guynn, 2016). Even though the features may be tweaked a bit if users begin to complain that friends’ fundraising appeals are overwhelming their News Feeds, nonprofits see the long-term potential in making fundraising easier on Facebook and are interested in testing out these new features. Mason Weintraub, director of digital engagement with Oxfam America, optimistically noted, “The exciting part about Facebook is that 1.6 billion people are already using it. Having that built-in network and having people with their own personal networks on there should help expose more people to Oxfam’s mission” (Guynn, 2016, para. 19). Thus,
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libraries should consider taking advantage of Facebook’s changing interface and features in order to grow their network of supporters and raise some money on the platform.
CONCLUSIONS Just as The Gap was in 1999, Facebook is at a pivotal moment in their history. They have become the leading brand in their industry and the question is whether or not they will be able to stay on top of their field. After the year 2000, The Gap lost their dominance and by 2016, profits were down 27% and they closed 175 stores (Li, 2016). Industry analysts, such as Neil Saunders, chief executive of the research firm Conlumino, point to The Gap’s inability to evolve their product to meet customer demands as the reason for their decline: “When you go into a Gap store, you know almost exactly what is in there. . .It’s the same old sort of stuff, and that’s why people got bored with it” (Li, 2016, para. 10). Facebook, however, has consistently worked at evolving their platform to meet the changing needs of their users and this may be what enables the platform to at the very least survive, if not thrive, in the coming years. That is not to say that Facebook is problem-free—both their ad revenue and user engagement levels are projected to slow (Kharpal, 2016; Wagner, 2016)— but if the platform continues to evolve to meet a wide variety of user needs, as it has done in the past, it will continue to play a significant role in the social media landscape. While the seemingly ever-changing Facebook interface coupled with the death of organic reach on the platform can be frustrating for libraries with minimal resources, they can successfully use the platform to reach out to their supporters. By strategically placing likeable ads on Facebook and experimenting with new features, libraries can take advantage of the fundamental attributes of the platform in order to fundraise. Fundraising on Facebook may be challenging for libraries because it can seem like trying to hit a moving target, but with over 1 billion users on the platform, Facebook should not be a gap in a library’s fundraising strategy.
CASE STUDY: PIMA COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY’S USE OF FACEBOOK EVENTS Facebook first introduced their Events feature back in 2005 (back then it was called My Parties) as a way that users could let their friends know
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about and later RSVP to the gatherings they were hosting (McHugh, 2015). For the longest time, Events was in maintenance mode at Facebook with only a handful of engineers devoted to keeping the platform functioning and many users were not fans of using the feature because of its limited functionality (McHugh, 2015). In 2014, however, Facebook realized that bigger Events meant more data and subsequently more growth on the platform, so they revised the feature in 2015 to make events more visible to users and make similar events easier to find (McHugh, 2015). As Facebook rolled out these changes, the Pima County Public Library in Arizona took notice and began increasingly listing their events on the platform. Lisa Waite Bunker, the Social Media Librarian from Pima County Public Library, said that she saw the opportunity that an expanded Events listing offered to her library so she encouraged library staff “to enter more events, and going in after to add the primary system page as a co-host, which vastly increased the exposure beyond the branch’s page” (Bunker, 2016, para. 5). Ultimately, without the use of any advertising dollars this strategy resulted in average events reach of 32,061 per month, which was three times the amount of likes on the primary Facebook page for the library at the time (Bunker, 2016, para. 5).
REFERENCES Abramovich, G. (2015). ’Tis the season for giving, according to ADI data. Retrieved from http://www.cmo.com/adobe-digital-insights/articles/2015/11/30/tis-the-season-forgiving-according-to-adi-data.html#gs.GDZY3_Y. Arrington, M. (2008). Facebook no longer the second largest social network. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/facebook-no-longer-the-second-largest-socialnetwork/. Bareket-Bojmel, L., Moran, S., & Shahar, G. (2016). Strategic self-presentation on Facebook: personal motives and audience response to online behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 788 795. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.10.033. Berk, C. (2016). 4 brands driving revenue with refreshed Facebook ad creative. Retrieved from http://www.nanigans.com/blog/fb/usu/brands-driving-revenue-refreshed-facebookad-creative. Bernazzani, S. (2015). 11 examples of Facebook ads that actually work (and why). Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33319/10-examples-of-facebook-ads-that-actually-work-and-why.aspx#sm.001cyjwk11794d8qskz1dg2qo43fq. Bosworth, A., Goldman, B., & McMillen, D. (2014). What’s the history of the awesome button (that eventually became the like button) on Facebook? Retrieved from https://www. quora.com/Facebook-company/Whats-the-history-of-the-Awesome-Button-thateventually-became-the-Like-button-on-Facebook. British Library [britishlibrary]. (2016). Every year we conserve over 2,000 items and as our collection continues to grow and age, so do the number of items that need our attention. One of the fragile items we’ve worked on is Elizabeth I’s prayer book which [Facebook status update]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/britishlibrary/.
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Bryant, M. (2014). These were our first ever Facebook statuses, what was yours? Retrieved from http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/04/first-ever-facebook-statuses/. Bunker, L. W. [lisabunker]. (2016). I knew FB events were pretty successful, but now I have numbers! For scale: no ads or boosts almost 10,000 Likes on the primary page, 26 branch pages are much smaller. Over a sample period of 5 months, we entered [Facebook status update]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/groups/LibrarySocial/permalink/560168697507421/. Chan, K. H. (2009). I like this. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/i-like-this/53024537130. della Cava, M. (2014). How Facebook changed our lives. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/02/facebook-turns-10-cultural-impact/5063979/. Elgot, J. (2015). From relationships to revolutions: Seven ways Facebook has changed the world. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/28/from-relationships-to-revolutions-seven-ways-facebook-has-changed-the-world. Facebook. (2013). Introducing hashtags on Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.facebookstudio.com/news/item/introducing-hashtags-on-facebook. Facebook. (2016a). Experiencing Vegas through virtual reality. Retrieved from https://www. facebook.com/business/success/lvcva-2. Facebook. (2016b). Newsroom: Company info. Retrieved from http://newsroom.fb.com/ company-info/. Facebook. (2016c). Shopify. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/business/success/ shopify. Facebook. (2016d). Facebook reports third quarter 2016 results. Retrieved from https://investor. fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter2016-Results/default.aspx. Gap Inc. (1999). 1999 Gap Inc. annual report. Retrieved from http://media.corporate-ir. net/media_files/IROL/11/111302/fin_annual_99.pdf. Gap Inc. (2016). The right fit since 1969. Retrieved from http://www.gapinc.com/content/gapinc/html/aboutus/ourstory.html. Gehl, R. W. (2013). A history of like. Retrieved from http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-history-of-like/. Gil-Or, O., Levi-Belz, Y., & Turel, O. (2015). The “Facebook-self ”: Characteristics and psychological predictors of false self-presentation on Facebook. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00099. Gottfried, J., & Shearer, E. (2016). News use across social media platforms 2016. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. Gross, D. (2006). The shrinking Gap: The ultimate ’90s brand slides toward the murky middle. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2006/03/the_shrinking_gap.html. Guynn, J. (2016). Coming to Facebook: Personal fundraisers. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday. com/story/tech/news/2016/06/30/facebook-nonprofits-fundraising-causes/86553690/. Haider, H. (2012). 7 creative ways nonprofits can use social media to drive donations. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33462/7-Creative-Ways-NonprofitsCan-Use-Social-Media-to-Drive-Donations.aspx#sm.001cyjwk11794d8qskz1dg2qo43fq. Hartung, A. (2011). How Facebook beat MySpace. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/ sites/adamhartung/2011/01/14/why-facebook-beat-myspace/#580ad5587023. Havlat, J. (n.d.). Visual storytelling on social media—get the picture? Retrieved from http:// nonprofithub.org/social-media/visual-storytelling-on-social-mediaget-the-picture/. Honan, M. (2014). I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days. Here’s what it did to me. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/.
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Hutchinson, A. (2016). Should you use hashtags on Facebook? Here’s what the research says. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/should-you-usehashtags-facebook-heres-what-research-says. Jackson, J. (2016). Google and Facebook to take 71% of UK online ad revenue by 2020. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/15/google-facebook-uk-online-ad-revenue. Kelleher, K. (2010). How Facebook learned from MySpace’s mistakes. Retrieved from http:// fortune.com/2010/11/19/how-facebook-learned-from-myspaces-mistakes/. Kelly, H. (2013). Facebook ‘likes’ can reveal your secrets, study finds. Retrieved from http:// www.cnn.com/2013/03/11/tech/social-media/facebook-likes-study/. Kharpal, A. (2016). Facebook user engagement growth might be slowing down thanks to Snapchat. Retrieved from http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/04/facebook-user-engagementgrowth-might-be-slowing-down-thanks-to-snapchat.html. Kim, S. (2015). Gap’s fashion, pop-culture highs and lows through the years. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Business/gaps-fashion-pop-culture-highs-lows-years/story? id 5 31803481. Knibbs, K. (2014). How Facebook’s design has changed over the last 10 years. Retrieved from http://www.dailydot.com/debug/old-facebook-profiles-news-feeds/. Lafferty, J. (2016). You want a dislike button? Here’s why Facebook isn’t giving you one. Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/you-want-a-dislike-button-heres-why-facebook-isnt-giving-you-one/634935. Li, S. (2016). Does Gap have an identity problem? Why the retailer’s sales keep dropping. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gap-struggles-20160517-snapstory.html. Luckerson, V. (2015). Here’s why Facebook wants a ‘dislike’ button. Retrieved from http:// time.com/4035551/facebook-dislike-button-zuckerberg/. Manson, M. (2014). Facebook zero: Considering life after the demise of organic reach. Retrieved from https://social.ogilvy.com/facebook-zero-considering-life-after-the-demise-oforganic-reach/. McHugh, M. (2015). Hate Facebook Events? Soon it’ll actually be useful—really useful. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/11/inside-facebook-events-updates/. Morgan, E. (2014). I quit liking things on Facebook for two weeks. Here’s how it changed my view of humanity. Retrieved from https://medium.com/swlh/i-quit-liking-things-on-facebookfor-two-weeks-heres-how-it-changed-my-view-of-humanity-29b5102abace#.wdraya9g8. Oremus, W. (2014). Facebook’s new secret sauce. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/04/facebook_news_feed_edgerank_facebook_algorithms_facebook_machine_learning.html. Oremus, W. (2016). Who controls your Facebook feed. Retrieved from http://www.slate. com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html. Owano, N. (2013). Study examines viral reach of hashtags on Facebook. Retrieved from http://phys.org/news/2013-09-viral-hashtags-facebook.html. Phillips, S. (2007). A brief history of Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia. Ragland, L. (2016). Here’s the best way to fundraise on Facebook. Retrieved from http://www. networkforgood.com/nonprofitblog/heres-the-best-way-to-fundraise-on-facebook/. Romano, A. (2016). The scariest part of Facebook’s fake news problem: Fake news is more viral than real news. Retrieved from http://www.vox.com/2016/11/16/13626318/viral-fakenews-on-facebook. Schneider, A.P. (2004). Facebook expands beyond Harvard. Retrieved from http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-beyond-harvard-harvard-students/.
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Shewan, D. (2016). 7 awesome Facebook ad examples (and why they work). Retrieved from http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/23/facebook-ad-examples. Smith, G. (2016). Facebook’s fake news crackdown: It’s complicated. Retrieved from https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/facebook-s-quest-to-stop-fake-newsrisks-becoming-slippery-slope. Spivack, E. (2013). When the Gap was everywhere: Through staged fashion shoots, an artists’ collective critiqued the ascendant sportswear retailer. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-the-gap-was-everywhere-20869051/. Tate, A. (2015). We analyzed 37,259 Facebook ads and here’s what we learned. Retrieved from https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/we-analyzed-37259-facebook-ads-and-hereswhat-we-learned/. Toma, C. L., & Choi, M. (2015). The couple who Facebooks together, stays together: Facebook self-presentation and relationship longevity among college-aged dating couples. Cyberpsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 18(7), 367 372. Retrieved from http://online.liebertpub.com/loi/CYBER. Vargas, J.A. (2010). The Face of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg opens up. Retrieved from http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook. Wagner, K. (2016). Facebook says ad revenue growth will start slowing down next year. Retrieved from http://www.recode.net/2016/11/2/13503876/facebook-revenue-growth-problem-earnings-q3. Wallaroo Media. (2016). Facebook algorithm change history. Retrieved from http://wallaroomedia.com/facebook-newsfeed-algorithm-change-history/. Washenko, A. (2013). 3 Facebook hashtag campaigns that have already become hits. Retrieved from http://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-hashtag-campaigns/.
How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Facebook? At the dawn of the new millennium, The Gap was a rising retail megastar. The clothing outlet founded by Doris and Don Fisher in 1969 after Don could not find a pair of jeans that fit had an impressive history of growth. Over 30 years, The Gap had diversified, acquiring Banana Republic as well as creating GapKids and Old Navy (Gap Inc., 2016). They opened 570 stores across three continents in just 1999 alone (Gap Inc., 1999) and by the end of that year, Gap Inc. had rung up a stunning 11.6 billion dollars in net sales (Gross, 2006). The real power of The Gap in 1999, however, laid in their ability to shape culture. In the 1990s, The Gap’s cache was that they produced quality but affordable clothing that both celebrities and everyday people wore. Popular advertisements featured rapper LL Cool J wearing Gap baggy jeans, writer Joan Didion and her daughter wearing turtlenecks, and choreographed routines performed by a diverse group of gorgeous models/dancers all donning Gap t-shirts and khakis (Kim, 2015). Business writer Daniel Gross noted just how much of a hold the brand had over people’s fashion choices: “The Gap influenced the way people dressed— remember the unfortunate jeans and light-blue work-shirt period when yuppies outfitted themselves like dock hands?” (para. 2). Thus, the real power of The Gap was in their ability to shape the world beyond fashion. The Gap did not just sell clothing, they sold an aspirational lifestyle with the ads implying that anyone who wore The Gap clothing could be like the featured celebrities and models (Spivack, 2013). In 1999, The Gap was at the pinnacle of their success and the social media platform Facebook is experiencing a similar moment in their own history. Like The Gap, Facebook has a history of expansion and shaping the world beyond their own industry. Unlike The Gap, change is at the heart of Facebook’s operations. While Facebook’s fundamental attributes of status updates and likes allow libraries to craft fundraising ads and appeals, the extent to which Facebook can adapt to meet the changing needs of their users will determine how valuable the platform is for libraries and Fundraising DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102003-6.00006-8
Copyright © 2018 Joyce V. Garczynski. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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their fundraising efforts. The ever-present change that underlies the platform means that libraries must be willing to adapt their fundraising strategies to Facebook’s changing platform if they want to be successful.
FACEBOOK’S HISTORY OF GROWTH AND CHANGE In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University (Vargas, 2010). Originally called “the facebook” after the staff and student profile pages that Harvard handed out to first year students (Phillips, 2007), it was simply a directory of individual profiles that users can update (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Within 24 h, 1200 Harvard students had signed up (Phillips, 2007) and within a month, Zuckerberg expanded the platform to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford (Schneider, 2004). In August 2005, the facebook became just Facebook after the domain was purchased for 200,000 dollars and in September 2006, the platform became freely available to anyone with an e-mail address and revenue was expected to come from advertisements (Phillips, 2007). Over time, Facebook steadily grew by expanding the user base of the platform. In 2007, MySpace was the dominant social media platform, boasting about 100,000 unique worldwide visitors per month compared to Facebook’s 40,000 (Arrington, 2008). Facebook, nevertheless, continued to add new users while MySpace languished and by 2008 Facebook became the dominant global social media platform (Arrington, 2008). How was Facebook able to expand while MySpace faltered? Some analysts point to problems at MySpace, such as controlling corporate leadership by their new owner NewsCorp (Hartung, 2011), or the platform’s decision to allow users to design their own space which created “a wasteland of cluttered and annoying pages” (Kelleher, 2010, para. 7). It was really Facebook’s ability to learn from MySpace’s missteps, however, that allowed Facebook to flourish. Facebook opted for a cleaner, more streamlined design than MySpace which appealed to a broader audience and allowed them to grow their user base (Kelleher, 2010). Also, Facebook was open to change their platform’s features based on user feedback. “The brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg was his willingness to allow Facebook to go wherever the market wanted it. Farmville and other social games—why not?...The founders kept pushing the technology to do anything users wanted” (Hartung, 2011, para. 5). It has been Facebook’s willingness to change their platform that has allowed them to grow their user base and shape worldwide information consumption. When Facebook celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2014,
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technology writer Kate Knibbs chronicled how the platform’s design had undergone at least some change every year except 2012, the same year that they bought Instagram and became a publically traded company. In some years the alterations were minor, such as adding new features like video in 2007 (Knibbs, 2014), but in other years Facebook made more substantial changes. For example, Facebook added the News Feed in 2006 allowing users to automatically see other’s status updates every time they logged into the platform (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Many of the changes that Facebook would make over the years would be related to how status updates are arranged on the News Feed. In 2009, Facebook went from displaying status updates in chronological order to prioritizing popular posts (those that received the most engagement such as receiving lots of likes) (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Ever since that change was made in 2009, Facebook has been tweaking their algorithm in an effort to provide users with the content they want to see at the top of their News Feed. All told, between their founding in 2004 and the end of 2016, Facebook has changed what the platform does or how information is displayed on the platform over 35 times (Wallaroo Media, 2016). Users have not always welcome all of this change. In 2008 when Facebook transformed the News Feed into the Wall and in 2011 when they transformed the Wall into the Timeline, some users threatened to leave if Facebook did not rollback these dramatic changes (Knibbs, 2014). In both instances, Facebook stuck with the changes and then moved on to make even more. Why does Facebook change their platform so much? Writing for Slate, Oremus (2016) argues that Facebook changes so much because the intelligence behind the platform is human and humans are not always predictable beings. Business reporter Adam Hartung (2011) has a less existential explanation: changes allow the company to expand. “If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen. . .And looking within the comments for what would be the . . . next revision that would lead to more uses, more users and more growth” (para. 5). Facebook has grown substantially over time, becoming by far the largest social media platform. As of September 2016, Facebook has an average of 1.18 billion daily active users with almost 85% of those daily active users coming from outside the United States and Canada (Facebook, 2016b). With such an extensive user base, Facebook has influenced how everyone communicates and as a result, shaped culture and history. On a most basic level, Facebook changed language, adding value to terms such
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as “like” and “share” as well as transforming “friend” into a verb (Elgot, 2015). This change in terminology has had a powerful impact on offline relationships as well. Because Facebook makes staying connected relatively easy, friendships that might have once dissipated when one party moves can now live on despite geographic separation (della Cava, 2014). In addition, all friends, whether they be your best friend from childhood or that person you worked with for 5 months in 2010, are now on equal footing (Elgot, 2015) and it is up to a frequently-changing algorithm to determine to what extent you will see what those friends have to say. Facebook’s ability to change language has shaped how we behave and even impacted historical events. From finding friends with common interests, to playing games, to shopping, almost every aspect of a user’s social life can be conducted through the Facebook platform and that is how Facebook has designed it to be. “Facebook knows what you like. . .Advertisers may butter Facebook’s bread, but its most pressing interest of all is in keeping its users coming back for more. If it ever fails at that, its advertising business will implode” (Oremus, 2014, para. 3). One area of users’ lives that Facebook has significantly impacted has been news consumption, with a greater percentage turning to the platform to find out what is happening in their world. According to the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit research center in the United States, 62% of Americans said that they get their news from social media and 66% of Facebook users say they get their news from the platform (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). This means that Facebook has the power to control what information the public sees and as a result, how they understand the world around them. For instance, after the 2016 US Presidential election, numerous political pundits criticized Facebook for allowing fake news to circulate on their platform and possibly influencing the outcome of the election (Romano, 2016). This was bolstered by an investigation by Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, who found that fake news on Facebook garnered thousands more likes and shares than stories from legitimate outlets (Romano, 2016). CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to this controversy by posting that “less than one percent of all content on the site could be classified as ‘fake news and hoaxes’” (Romano, 2016, para. 1) but the platform was willing to take some steps, such as working with third-party fact checkers, to help improve accuracy (Smith, 2016). Ultimately Zuckerberg said that whatever changes Facebook implements to address their fake news problem, they do not want to discourage users from
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sharing their opinions on the platform (Smith, 2016). Although many activists were disappointed in Zuckerberg’s initial response, his position is not surprising because it is in-line with Facebook’s goals of continuing to expand the platform while still remaining true to the social medium’s fundamental attributes.
FACEBOOK FUNDAMENTALS: STATUS UPDATES, LIKES, AND CHANGE Even though change is at the heart of Facebook, the platform does have two additional fundamental attributes, status updates and likes, that play a role in determining what content is effective on the platform. Libraries can look to businesses to see how they have used these attributes in their posts and incorporate some of these same techniques into their own fundraising efforts.
Status Updates Even though they were not a part of Facebook’s initial 2004 design and they have evolved into paid ads for organizations, the concept of sharing a status update has become a fundamental attribute of the platform. Facebook launched status updates at the same time as they launched the News Feed in September 2006, and these two innovations transformed the platform from a directory to a social media platform that allowed users to easily keep up to date with what other users were doing. These early status updates really were not magnificent works of art; they were mostly people announcing that they had joined the platform and trying to figure out how it all worked. For example, in honor of Facebook’s 10th anniversary, the staff of the online magazine TNW shared their first status updates in 2007 which included simply saying “at home” to a more complex musing of “How the hell does Facebook work? What’s this for? MySpace is so much simpler. . .” (Bryant, 2014, para. 7, 8). As Facebook grew, users began sharing more and more of their lives on the platform and their status updates became more personal and more meaningful. In fact, a 2015 study found that couples who make their dating relationships “Facebook official”—they have declared their relationship on the platform—show an increase in commitment to the relationship and are more likely to still be together 6 months after going official than those couples that did not go official (Toma & Choi, 2015).
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With more and more people and organizations posting more and more status updates, users’ News Feeds became crowded so Facebook decided to prioritize popular posts so users would not miss the content they wanted to see. This change to an algorithm-driven feed coupled with Facebook’s subsequent history of tweaking that algorithm according to user feedback meant that organizations had to become a whole lot more thoughtful with what they posted and how they posted if they wanted it to be seen by potential customers. Even still, Facebook continued to grow and by 2014 organizations began to see a real decline in who they could reach with free posts (known as organic reach). According to marketing firm Ogilvy, Facebook began restricting the organic reach of posts made by brands to around 16% in 2012 and the decline continued to an average of 6.15% in February 2014 (Manson, 2014). This meant that out of every 100 people who liked an organization’s Facebook page, only 6 of those people would even see the post. This kind of decline led analysts to declare organic reach as being dead and left brands and other organizations with little choice but to buy advertisements on Facebook if they wanted to reach their followers. Ads have become big business at Facebook. In the third-quarter of 2016, Facebook made approximately 6.8 billion dollars from advertising on their platform (Facebook, 2016d) and by 2020, Facebook and Google are poised to take 71% of the United Kingdom’s online ad revenue ( Jackson, 2016). So what can organizations do to get their ads noticed on Facebook? According to experts, the key is to return to Facebook’s roots of the status update in order to create ad content that looks and feels like a well-crafted status update from a personal friend. On a basic level, analysts recommend keeping the text to a minimum—most ads only use 5 words in the headline and just 14 words in the post text (Tate, 2015)— and including either an image or a video which is more likely to be remembered and shared (Bernazzani, 2015). Beyond that, however, the key to an effective ad on Facebook is to use the text and images/videos to tell a compelling story to a targeted audience and an example of this is Salem Five Bank’s bank happily ever after ads. Their campaign began with a Carousel Ad (a series of captioned images) of happy couples and the post text of “You found the person you love. It’s time to love your checking account. Answer 2 questions about your life, and bank happily ever after” (Berk, 2016, para. 8). Each of the images in the Carousel Ad was captioned with a few words about an applicable bank service, including a picture of a couple in front of the Eiffel Tower captioned, “If it’s
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Time for an Adventure. . .Free ATMs worldwide” (Berk, 2016, para. 8). These ads were so compelling because they were not only selling convenient banking options during a busy time for the couple, but they were also selling the couples a status update of a happy, fun-filled engagement.
Likes Just like status updates, likes were not part of the original Facebook interface. But ever since they were added in 2007, the ability to give a thumbs up or like another user’s status update has changed the way users engage with the content on the platform and as a result, liking has become a fundamental attribute of Facebook. Initially when Facebook engineers were designing a way for users to more easily and clearly react to posts than to comment, they developed a prototype of an “awesome button,” but scrapped that in favor of a like button because like is a more universal emotion (Bosworth, Goldman, & McMillen, 2014). The thought was that this new paring of liking and commenting would be similar to rating and reviewing a restaurant online, with liking being equivalent to giving the restaurant five stars and commenting being equivalent to writing a detailed review about what was so wonderful about the restaurant (Chan, 2009). Initially Facebook executives feared that the presence of like button would diminish user comments on the site, but early tests showed that the presence of the like button actually increased the number of comments a post received (Bosworth et al., 2014). Thus, the like button helped increase user engagement on Facebook which helped make the platform more appealing to advertisers. Although the addition of a like button may have seemed like serendipity for Facebook, Communication professor Robert W. Gehl (2013) contends that advertising research conducted before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook suggested that such an innovation would be successful. In the early 1990s, the Advertising Research Foundation’s “Copy Research Validity Project” took a look at what features determined whether or not an advertisement would increase revenues and they found that “of all the measures, ‘likability’ was the surprise winner” (Gehl, 2013, para. 5). In other words, the more people like something, the more they want to interact with it and buy it (Gehl, 2013). The ability to like posts on Facebook not only influences users’ buying habits, it shapes the content on the platform as well as how users present themselves. Facebook keeps track of every single post and page
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that a user likes and uses that information along with other activities on the social medium to determine what posts that user will see (Oremus, 2016) and to predict what other content that user would like to see (Kelly, 2013). The impact of the like on how a user experiences the platform played out in a series of experiments in 2014. When Mat Honan (2014) liked everything he encountered on the platform for 48 h, he ended up with a News Feed that feel foreign and downright meaningless to him. This contrasts with Elan Morgan’s (2014) experiment to stop liking anything at all on Facebook which resulted in her getting more of the content she actually wanted to see, rather than just more extreme versions of the content she had liked. Both experiments suggest that liking alters how users experience Facebook and as a result, how users interact with the world around them. Researchers have found that users tend to present their best selves on Facebook and other social platforms, sharing information or images that they believe other users will like and will enhance those other users’ perceptions (Bareket-Bojmel, Moran, & Shahar, 2016). In extreme cases, there is a wide gap between a user’s authentic self and the self that person shares on social media (Gil-Or, Levi-Belz, & Turel, 2015). This is problematic because having a false Facebook-self is associated with low self-esteem and “can serve as a gateway issue to more problematic behaviors which may lead to psychological problems and even pathologies, such as Facebook addiction” (Gil-Or et al., 2015, p. 9). Even though liking can have negative consequences for certain individuals on the platform, liking has proven to be such a boon for Facebook that they resisted expanding it to other emotions for almost 10 years. Users have requested a dislike option for years, arguing that like is “binary and unequivocal” and they did not have an option for reacting to tragic news on the platform (Luckerson, 2015, para. 4). In 2016 Facebook added Reactions, a series of five additional emotion choices ranging from love to anger that a user can place on another user’s post, but refused to add a dislike option (Lafferty, 2016). Robert Gehl predicted in 2013 that Facebook would not institute a dislike button because like was too good for business and Zuckerberg confirmed this in 2014 by saying, “I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives” (Lafferty, 2016, para. 5). Since positivity sells on Facebook, it is no wonder that marketers have embraced it in their advertising campaigns on the platform. An analysis of
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over 35,000 Facebook advertisements found that when ads do have a valence, it tends to be slightly positive with ads including words like yummy and win (Tate, 2015). A successful example of this is e-commerce platform Shopify’s ads targeted at acquiring new merchants. Shopify launched a series of visual ads on Facebook that coupled beautiful photos of crafted objects with aspirational language like “What’s stopping you?” (Shewan, 2016, para. 30). Also by including a link directing users to where they could get started selling their crafts, Shopify was able to acquire new merchants for 10 times less than with these Facebook posts than with paid search advertisements (Facebook, 2016c). Thus, liking is an enduring attribute on Facebook that continues to drive successful content on the platform.
Change As described earlier, change has played a significant role in Facebook’s history. Since the platform and/or the algorithm driving the News Feed are evolving to meet user demands, change can really be considered a fundamental attribute of the platform. This means that it is advantageous for organizations seeking to share content on the platform to stay informed about updates to the platform and adapt their communications strategies accordingly if they want to be successful. A good example of how a practice has evolved on Facebook is the use of hashtags. Facebook first introduced hashtags on their platform back in 2013, after they had already become a strong presence on other social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram (Hutchinson, 2016). When Facebook (2013) introduced hashtags they encouraged marketers to use them, saying that deploying them on Facebook would amplify campaigns on other channels that are already using hashtags. Once they were released, marketing bloggers began to recommend best practices for organizations using hashtags in their Facebook campaigns. In addition, hashtags on Facebook received a boost when major corporations such as Starbucks, Major League Baseball, and Cover Girl were all designed advertising campaigns built around this new feature and achieved some initial marketing success (Washenko, 2013). After a while though, the tide began to turn against hashtags when researchers uncovered that the median reach on viral posts was higher for posts without hashtags than posts with them (Owano, 2013). Ultimately, marketers have moved on to the next Facebook development and many like Francisco Rosales
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of the blog “Social Mouths” now recommend using hashtags “in very specific cases like an event or a promotion, with the proper support of other media”(Hutchinson, 2016, para. 25). The example of hashtags on Facebook demonstrates how organizations who are early adopters of new features on the social media platform can use those new features, for a limited time, to achieve promotional success. If you take a look at Facebook for Business’ Success Stories, most of the case studies presented have taken advantage of a new development in Facebook technology to achieve their success. For instance, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority used Facebook’s new 360 video feature to attain a 16% click through rate on their Facebook advertisements (Facebook, 2016a). Thus, the key to marketing success on Facebook seems to be keeping up with new developments on the platform, being willing to experiment with new features, and being willing to change marketing practices as new developments happen on the platform.
CRAFTING FUNDRAISING APPEALS FOR FACEBOOK When it comes to fundraising on Facebook, libraries should keep in mind the fundamental attributes of the platform and look to model the successful practices employed by other businesses, nonprofits, and other libraries. By strategically crafting and boosting status updates that are visually compelling, keep text to a minimum, and are likeable, as well as taking advantage of Facebook’s newest features, libraries can successfully reach potential donors on the platform.
Strategic Storytelling Status Updates The first step to creating successful fundraising content on Facebook is to determine what the library’s goals are. There are lots of options such as increasing engagement in preparation for a future ask, receiving a set amount of contributions for a particular project, or thanking donors in order to maintain a relationship with them, just to name a few. Whatever the goal, it is a good idea to outline it first and then determine how successful completion of the goal will be defined. (There will be more about assessment of fundraising efforts in Chapter 10: How Can Libraries Determine Success?.) When setting the goal, it also is important to keep in mind what resources are required to achieve that goal. Given the apparent death of organic reach on Facebook discussed earlier, libraries will most likely have to follow the lead of other nonprofit organizations and strategically pay for advertisements if they want their fundraising
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content to be seen by their target audience. An example of successful nonprofit advertising content on Facebook was Project Healing Waters’ advertisement in late 2015. Two weeks ahead of Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday following Thanksgiving in the United States when nonprofit organizations focus on fundraising, Project Healing Waters spent 30 dollars to promote their page (Ragland, 2016). Their ad contained a simple description about the organization’s mission, a link to their Facebook page, and a compelling image related to the work of the nonprofit (Ragland, 2016). Because of this ad, Project Healing Waters acquired 621 new page likes and when Giving Tuesday came, the organization did not have to boost their post on that day because those who newly liked the page saw the fundraising appeal organically (Ragland, 2016). Using this strategy and others, Project Healing Waters ultimately was able to raise 15,000 dollars on Giving Tuesday (Ragland, 2016). When crafting fundraising content for Facebook, libraries should follow the example of successful organizations’ marketing on the platform. Posts should tell a likeable story and contain a visual, either a graphic, image, or video that supports the story. The nonprofit Habitat for Humanity does this well; they post progress pictures of the houses that they are building and they include the stories of their volunteers and the families they help as well (Havlat, n.d.). These types of posts encourage followers to keep checking their News Feeds for updates and they add a personal element to the narrative that the organization is telling on Facebook about the work that they do (Havlat, n.d.). These storytelling posts can then be coupled with an ask for contributions and a link to the organization’s giving site or directions for how someone can give. The Make a Wish Foundation has frequently used this approach in their fundraising posts (Haider, 2012). In the past, they have posted an ask for contributions—“By 11:59 p.m. today, we need to raise $7,500 to Adopt-A-Wish. For as little as $1, you can help grant a wish for a child with a life-threatening illness” (Haider, 2012, para. 8)—and then linked to their giving page which briefly tells the story of the first wish that the foundation granted. Libraries can replicate this approach on their own Facebook pages by visually telling the story of a user who have benefitted from one of their services (such as help finding a job) and ending the post with an ask for contributions and a link to the website where someone can support that service. Another possibility is for libraries to tell the stories of the items in their collections and couple those posts with an ask for a contribution to support that collection. The British Library has done this well on their Facebook page; they have posted a photo of and a description about the
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progress they are making on conserving a significant item, such as Elizabeth I’s prayer book, and they ended the post with an ask for contributions, such as “Make a donation today and help us preserve more treasures,” and a link to their donations page (British Library, 2016). These visual storytelling posts coupled with an ask for contributions can help libraries showcase their value and provide their followers with an easy way to support that value.
Facebook Changes Just as corporations have been able to take advantage of Facebook’s changing features to reach their intended audiences, libraries can do this as well with their efforts to build support if they are willing and able to experiment with the new features on the platform. As described in the Case Study at the end of this chapter, Pima County Public Library in Arizona has done this well through their use of Facebook Events. Also, some of Facebook’s most recent updates are efforts to make fundraising easier on the platform. In the second half of 2016, Facebook added Fundraisers, a tool that allows individual users to set up fundraising campaigns for US charities that the platform has vetted. Eligible libraries may want to consider experimenting with this feature and any future fundraising developments on the medium because Facebook has two good reasons to do everything in their power to help nonprofits successfully fundraise on their platform—they stand to gain both users and money. Currently only 3% of the online traffic going to charities’ websites comes from social media (Abramovich, 2015). Thus, if Facebook can convince users to go to them instead of Google to find a reputable charity, they will be able to grow their user base. Also, Facebook is taking 5% of all the revenue raised through Fundraisers so if fundraising is successful on the platform, it can prove to be a lucrative revenue stream for them as well (Guynn, 2016). Even though the features may be tweaked a bit if users begin to complain that friends’ fundraising appeals are overwhelming their News Feeds, nonprofits see the long-term potential in making fundraising easier on Facebook and are interested in testing out these new features. Mason Weintraub, director of digital engagement with Oxfam America, optimistically noted, “The exciting part about Facebook is that 1.6 billion people are already using it. Having that built-in network and having people with their own personal networks on there should help expose more people to Oxfam’s mission” (Guynn, 2016, para. 19). Thus,
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libraries should consider taking advantage of Facebook’s changing interface and features in order to grow their network of supporters and raise some money on the platform.
CONCLUSIONS Just as The Gap was in 1999, Facebook is at a pivotal moment in their history. They have become the leading brand in their industry and the question is whether or not they will be able to stay on top of their field. After the year 2000, The Gap lost their dominance and by 2016, profits were down 27% and they closed 175 stores (Li, 2016). Industry analysts, such as Neil Saunders, chief executive of the research firm Conlumino, point to The Gap’s inability to evolve their product to meet customer demands as the reason for their decline: “When you go into a Gap store, you know almost exactly what is in there. . .It’s the same old sort of stuff, and that’s why people got bored with it” (Li, 2016, para. 10). Facebook, however, has consistently worked at evolving their platform to meet the changing needs of their users and this may be what enables the platform to at the very least survive, if not thrive, in the coming years. That is not to say that Facebook is problem-free—both their ad revenue and user engagement levels are projected to slow (Kharpal, 2016; Wagner, 2016)— but if the platform continues to evolve to meet a wide variety of user needs, as it has done in the past, it will continue to play a significant role in the social media landscape. While the seemingly ever-changing Facebook interface coupled with the death of organic reach on the platform can be frustrating for libraries with minimal resources, they can successfully use the platform to reach out to their supporters. By strategically placing likeable ads on Facebook and experimenting with new features, libraries can take advantage of the fundamental attributes of the platform in order to fundraise. Fundraising on Facebook may be challenging for libraries because it can seem like trying to hit a moving target, but with over 1 billion users on the platform, Facebook should not be a gap in a library’s fundraising strategy.
CASE STUDY: PIMA COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY’S USE OF FACEBOOK EVENTS Facebook first introduced their Events feature back in 2005 (back then it was called My Parties) as a way that users could let their friends know
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about and later RSVP to the gatherings they were hosting (McHugh, 2015). For the longest time, Events was in maintenance mode at Facebook with only a handful of engineers devoted to keeping the platform functioning and many users were not fans of using the feature because of its limited functionality (McHugh, 2015). In 2014, however, Facebook realized that bigger Events meant more data and subsequently more growth on the platform, so they revised the feature in 2015 to make events more visible to users and make similar events easier to find (McHugh, 2015). As Facebook rolled out these changes, the Pima County Public Library in Arizona took notice and began increasingly listing their events on the platform. Lisa Waite Bunker, the Social Media Librarian from Pima County Public Library, said that she saw the opportunity that an expanded Events listing offered to her library so she encouraged library staff “to enter more events, and going in after to add the primary system page as a co-host, which vastly increased the exposure beyond the branch’s page” (Bunker, 2016, para. 5). Ultimately, without the use of any advertising dollars this strategy resulted in average events reach of 32,061 per month, which was three times the amount of likes on the primary Facebook page for the library at the time (Bunker, 2016, para. 5).
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