Follower Growth Campaign
The Franciscan (OFM) headquarters in Rome wanted to grow its Facebook audience, but realized to do so they needed help. Longbeard was engaged to co-develop and execute a content strategy that would significantly increase their followers and content engagements globally.
The Challenge
The Curia had a modest demonstration budget and a skeletal communication’s staff. The OFM also has over 2000 communities around the world that communicate in dozens of languages. How do we equitably engage the millions touched by the OFM?
The Outcome
Incredible! Grew OFM’s followers by 520% amounting to over 100,000 new and highly engaged followers from around the world. Impressions increased by over 12,000% and engagements over 46,000%.
The Objective
Determine the feasibility of exponentially growing the Curia's Facebook audience.
The Challenges
- Budget. The Curia had a very modest test budget.
- Data. Longbeard had access to very little data to devise a strategy.
- Support. The Curia had one person in charge of communications who was stretched very thin.
- Diversity. The global nature of the Order meant audiences had to be tailored carefully by region.
We knew the Franciscans had strong brand penetration around the world, but we were concerned that a lack of communication resources at the Curia might result in intermittent content generation and therefore lead to follower retention issues and low engagement.
Matthew H. Sanders
CEO, Longbeard
The Insights
- Engagement. Once content optimizations were completed, we witnessed engagement and followers costs lower than we had ever seen.
- Demographics. The coveted 18-25 age cohort constituted over 50% of the Curia’s followers and 75% were male. Given the importance of vocations (recruiting) to the Order, these were very promising results.
- Location. Strong growth was witnessed across 4 continents, but Facebook’s algorithm demonstrated preferences for particular regions and so manual adjustments were needed to ensure equitable distribution of resources for global follower growth.
- Content. Longbeard’s high-design work was very effective at garnering engagements. Working with the Curia to refine their visual content development practices, we immediately witnessed exceptional improvement in their content engagement levels.
The most rewarding part of this project was witnessing the improvement of the Curia’s content over time as they learned from Longbeard’s content testing and optimization process.
Matthew H. Sanders
CEO, Longbeard
The Outcome
- Followers. 520% growth of the Curia’s Facebook followers to over 124,000.
- Engagements. Engagements grew over the testing period by over 46,000%.
- Impressions. Impressions increased by over 12,000% during the testing period.
- Costs. Costs of engagements were frequently as low as $0.002 and costs of follower acquisition at $0.06 on average.
Longbeard is more like a partner in ministry: the work they give is professionalism at its best yet it’s also very personalized.
Fr. Alvin Te
Director of Communications, OFM General Curia
