David Suzuki Foundation Healthy Oceans campaigner Jodi Stark attended NetSquared Camp last weekend. And she learned something! Yay! So these unconferences are worth doing. 🙂
Jodi’s story
Last weekend I went to Eli’s NetSquared Camp where I learned that an image coupled with some text is BY FAR the most liked, shared and commented on item you can post on Facebook.
Daren Barefoot and Theo Lamb from Capulet Communications presented some very recent (and still unpublished) research that looked at the posts of 25 top NGOs (including the David Suzuki Foundation) and analyzed what type of materials got the most traction.
A compelling image or infographic topped the list. It received significantly more likes, shares and comments than any other post, including video.
So, in the spirit of learning and experimenting, I decided last week to test this out and created this image on Facebook.
And guess what? It worked! We posted this on Saturday and in short order, we got:
- 1000 shares
- 180 comments
- 342 likes
(The DSF page was also liked by 1000 more people this weekend. We can’t attribute this to the image, but we do know that with 1000 shares, we got huge exposure to lots of new Facebook friends).
We also got:
- 3050 visits to the blog from Facebook (4500 total visit)
- 560 people who followed up and signed our action
As predicted, this is significantly higher than most of DSF’s FB posts. This blog received almost double the amount of views than any other healthy oceans blog in the last year, and that doesn’t include the number of eye balls who saw the image on FB but didn’t link to the blog).
The post is currently #2 (out of 158) post for ‘engaged users’ for 2012 (i.e. # of unique people who have clicked anywhere on the post).
The post is currently #5 (out of 158) for ‘most talked about’ (i.e. # of unique people liking, commenting or sharing the post).
The best part is – it’s fun and easy to do! Laura Lefurgey-Smith, our intern, did a great job with the image and was great to work with.
So, I encourage all of you in your work to think about an interesting, intriguing, odd or otherwise catchy image and some very short text to go with it. I think it’s a powerful entry point to our work.
Hi Jodi – Wow! I knew these types of images do well on Facebook, but I had no idea they do *so* well. Approximately how many likes, comments, and shares do you get on an ordinary (non-image) facebook update?
Thanks for sharing your success here. It’s great to hear that the Camp was a worthwhile event for you!
Thanks Claire. OK – How these numbers compared to our other posts: For this post we had 1135 unique people that liked, shared or commented. For our posts so far in 2012, our average is 257. Our median is 150. So this was significantly higher. Oil spills are top of mind right now, however, with all the discussion about the Enbridge pipeline, so I’m sure some of the attention had to do with that.
We were able to drive double the amount of traffic to our heathy oceans blog than we normally get.
Have fun experimenting! Please report back too – that’s an important part of collective learning which is at the core of Net Tuesday Vancouver.