Hi, Friend!
I used to work for a blood center where I was responsible for the marketing and communications. This was an important, you could even say “life-saving”, job because there would be times where the blood supply was so low that I needed to send out a message urging people to donate blood.
The blood center had about 10,000 Facebook followers who wanted to know when the local hospitals needed blood, so I would post an urgent message asking people to donate.
Unfortunately I was limited by Facebook's algorithm and typically only 100 - 125 people (1% of my audience!) would see my post. For emergencies like this, I would even pay to boost the post's reach but that would maybe increase it to 1,000 followers.
And even when the post reached 1,000 followers, the message most likely got lost in the sea of other posts. So when I posted an urgent message on Facebook, it generally didn’t result in appointments or walk-ins.
But when I sent an email, that got people’s
attention. The minute I sent an email we had people calling to schedule an appointment and the number of people walking into the blood center to donate would increase.
Our email list was about the same size as our Facebook followers. But it was the email that drove
people to take action (see below to learn which is better: email or social media).