How To: Facebook FRIENDraisers for Birth Activists

In our last post, we talked about using social media to deepen your birth and breastfeeding conference experience.

We were also looking for ways to engage the conference goers with social media. Here’s what we did – right down to the impact.

Facebook Friendraiser.

The goal: make as many (or more!) virtual new doula friends as we make face-to-face at the conference.

How-to:

1) Post.  Publish a blog post asking people to *share* our blog post and *like* us on Facebook.

2) Share.  When a new doula posted on CfM’s page during the friendraiser, we gave then a shout-out on our page and theirs.  (Doulas connected not just to us, but one another!)

3) Reward! We held a giveaway, mailing a fab gift bag with goodies from @yourdoulabag, @mamapeardesigns, and @jilliansdrawers to one of the participants.

4) Share more.  Be prepared to use your improved EdgeRank effectively  (read on for more!).  Have a great post you want to share ready to go.

The results:

Subscribers up, interactions up, ranking up.

Users up – by 247%.
Interactions up – by 562%

We were particularly excited by the increase in interactions. Why? Because higher interactions = higher EdgeRank. What’s EdgeRank? We’ll write more on this soon! Short answer – Facebook ranks your future post placements based on how many *interactions* you have relative to how many *users* you have. (Have you ever noticed that some posts rise to the top of the news feed? Thank a high EdgeRank. Check your ranking now!)

Before the friendraiser, our EdgeRank hovered in the single digits (depending on the date.)
The weekend of the friendraiser, it went up to 92.

With an EdgeRank as high as 92 we made sure to give lots of thanks to our community on Facebook as well as encourage and direct people to sign up for membership. We also have a newsletter coming out so having a high rating is a great way to ensure widespread awareness of our newest publication.

Be sure to act quickly and build on your momentum- EdgeRank drops back down if you don’t maintain engagement with your fans.  Consider other high-interaction posts like polls or status updates with questions.

Pros:

• Doulas who couldn’t make it to Boston got involved with the DONA conference and felt connected to the broader doula community (*waves* to SweetSongDoula who published a post linking to all friendraiser participants)
• We positioned Citizens for Midwifery as a communications hub for activist doulas
• We met lots of great doulas and made connections for future political actions

Cons:

• This is not a tool for doulas at the conference. While it is easy to tweet out a session or arrange a meetup on the fly, doulas were too busy getting to know one another face-to-face to take the time to swing through their news feed.
• Be prepared to spend some time! You might consider doing this *before* the conference so you don’t spend precious conference time hanging out on Facebook.

Have you used social media to keep up with a connection you made at a conference?  Give a shout-out to one of your new conference friends!