“Nothing” is a perfectly valid answer, but I’d also be interested in creative ideas.
The context for this is that I was involved with Trolley Problem Memes for about 1.5 years, and am still on good terms with the current FB page admins, who are all on board with making the page be more EA-useful.
I feel pretty disappointed about the lack of useful activities that has come out of the page so far,* and vaguely feel like more can be done, given the relatively large reach. I’d be interested in different people’s theories of change, whether as “landing page for getting more directed ads/Digital Marketing to EA projects and fellowships”, “broadly making consequentialism and longtermism ‘in the water supply’”, “training the admins for doing other impactful digital marketing projects later”or something else.
I would be especially excited for answers where someone proposes a plan and also has some excitement about personally volunteering to implement such a plan for the page.
Note that the page is less active than it used to be, but this can potentially change.
* So far: we had an AMF fundraiser which raised maybe 3k, we sold some merchandise worth maybe 1k, we tried to do some vegan outreach with ~0 effect, we tried plugging 80,000 Hours to basically ~0 effect. Some time after I stopped being involved, ~2 people have reached out to me saying that the page was involved in them being more interested in EA (though I’m not sure how much credit should go to the page), so it’s not nothing, but the ROI of the time spent is pretty bad.
I would suggest treating the page like a funnel to convert Facebook followers to engaged email subscribers first, then think more about where to direct that engagement after.
General steps I would follow:
1. Ramp activity back up and determine a growth strategy. Try to understand the existing audience engagement and the baseline growth rate over a month or so of consistent activity (how many people actually see the posts, how does engagement differ by type of content, do the followers care more about humor or EA, does cross-posting to Instagram get any traction, etc).
2. Create a funnel to convert followers to email subscribers. With no financial investment, this means incorporating email sign ups into the normal posts somehow (maybe every post has a link to sign up, or maybe 1 in 4 posts is solely for promoting the email sign up). If there is capacity for even a little financial investment, it will be possible to target the highly engaged followers with more precision using Facebook ads.
3. Create email campaigns to direct attention to worthwhile areas. What these “worthwhile areas” should be is what you’re actually asking about in the post. This could be a variety of things, maybe a longer term goal, or rotate through different short term campaigns. But for now, I think it will be more useful to confront this problem if the first two steps are proven solvable first, especially since details here will depend on how the email audience shapes up (age range, interest areas, etc).
Generally, I think pushing specific conversion goals directly from the Facebook page will be a difficult endeavor, like you’ve seen with the attempts you mentioned. The email funnel will be more productive if even a small percent of followers eventually become subscribers, and that will allow the Facebook page to be more focused on growth and reach (something it has already succeeded at).
Doing this well would require a serious time commitment. It really depends on how the first couple months of testing go, but I suspect there is significant upside. If interested, I’m happy to discuss more and see if there’s any way I can help!
Awesome, thanks for the advice! I’ll pass it along. Also, please do let me know if you or anybody you know would be interested in taking this on! :)