Authentic connections are at the heart of building a strong community. Use your Page to interact with your supporters and help them feel known and appreciated by your organization.

1. Post regularly using your post scheduler in the publishing tools.
2. Use post targeting, groups or custom audiences to connect with specific people.

Facebook is a two-way communication channel between you and your supporters. You can use posts, Messenger, groups, tags, comments and events to generate dialogue with supporters and connect them more deeply with your organization. Some ideas for inviting conversation:

• Invite conversations and respond to supporters by commenting on posts and turning on messaging for your Page.
• Post in a tone that encourages supporters to offer feedback by commenting.
• Share personal stories from your staff, supporters and beneficiaries that may inspire people to share their own.
• Create posts that give people who like your Page a reason to refer to them in their online conversations with friends-by being surprising, thought-provoking or relevant to a current event.
• If posting on a difficult issue, acknowledge the sensitivity and ask your supporters how they would talk about it.

People appreciate being heard. When you reply to posts and comments quickly, you’ll notice supporters are more responsive, too. Use the Messages and Notifications tabs in the Page Admin Tools to quickly access and follow up with all the people who interact with your Page. Here are some best practices:

• Regularly monitor your Page activity for comments and questions that need attention.
• Respond to post comments in a positive and timely manner.
• Like and comment on the posts of other Pages with similar audience to yours.
• Reach out to the most active people on your Page over Messenger, email or phone to thank them and learn more about their interest in your organization.

Who Do You Want to Reach?

Look at the goals you’ve set for your organization and think about the ways in which people can help you achieve them. How do your programs fulfill a need or solve a problem that a potential supporter would care about? Broadly think about who might be interested and who may benefit from being involved with your organization. Figuring out the value you bring to a community is the first step in identifying your ideal target audience. When choosing your target audience, consider demographic and interest characteristics:

• Demographic: This may include age, gender, location, ethnic background, marital status, income and more.
• Interest: This identifies more about potential supporters’ hobbies, behaviors, connections, lifestyle and more.

Use post targeting, groups or custom audiences to connect with specific people.

TIP: To help you pick the characteristics to target with your posts (for both paid and unpaid posts), we recommend using the Audience Insights tool to choose the characteristics you want to target and see how many people fit that criteria. This can show you if you should narrow or broaden your audience criteria, as well as identify the top Page likes and typical activity of a potential target audience. Note that the Audience Insights tool is currently available on desktop only.

As your posting strategy evolves, you may want to use a calendar to plan out your posts and stay organized. An editorial calendar can help if you have multiple people managing your posts. It can also keep track of relevant special events and holidays so you can post timely content. A posting calendar can also help you account for people at various levels of engagement with your organization, from people you’d like to reach for the first time to loyal supporters who take actions repeatedly. You may want to balance your posts to support audiences across the “supporter engagement funnel.”

Balance your content. The size of each level of the funnel reflects the number of people in your audience likely to be at that level, which may translate to the portion of posts you want to dedicate to each level of supporter.

Base your post planning on objectives. The objectives you outlined in your campaign strategy also inform how much time you focus on each level of supporter. If your main goal for using Facebook is to get people more deeply involved in your organization, you may choose to allocate more time to posts directed at people in the interested and engaged levels.