For the past two years, Clear and Simple Media has engaged with end-users on social media using three seperate Facebook pages. The Clear and Simple Media page connects the people who have partnered with us with news about the ministry. We also have built two “delivery” pages. A Simple Word encourages engagement with our website and all of the materials included there in simple English. Hear A Story connects people with our audio materials, especially the story set that introduces an overview of the Bible story, “from the beginning to the new beginning.”  Beginning February 1, 2018, CSM began a small experiment using social media to see if we could make some gains in sharing the good news in Indonesia.

We built a small post on the A Simple Word Facebook Page which simply read: “What do Christians believe? Download this free book and find out.” Then we put links in the post that would allow someone to download Simple Truths in both English and Bahasa (Indonesian) for free.

What happened next is something that we did not anticipate. Within the first 5 days, we had received 24,000 LIKES for that post. At the end of two weeks we had 98,000. As of today, the end of the promotion, the post has 105,466 post engagements, including LIKES, SHARES and LINK clicks. We are sorting through the data now, but it appears that as many as 1 to 2% have downloaded the book.

Since that time, we have been consulting individuals and ministries that use social media on a regular basis to examine what they do, how they do it, and how effective the connections are for sharing the gospel. What we have gathered thus far leads us to believe that another experiement is in order. So beginning the week of July 8, we will be placing separate ads on Facebook that will individually target four countries. For Indonesia, we will use an audio story from the HAS webpage to reengage with some of the over 100,000 people who liked our first ad giving away the free book. A second set of ads will target India. The ads will include an audio story selection, then a follow-up add offering Simple Truths as a free download in either Hindi, Urdu, English, or Punjabi. A third set of ads will target Brazil. This South American country is one of the most active on Facebook (fourth largest number of users after India, the US, and Indonesia). Finally, we will use the new Japanese translation of Simple Truths, to build ads to target Japan.

What we hope to do, of course, is see as many people exposed to the materials and the websites as possible. But we also want to take a careful look at the analytics that these ads produce. We believe that they can help us be more effective at using social media as a “delivery” tool for the gospel and a way to connect with new believers to help them in their desire to follow Jesus.