What actually works in garnering likes, comments and shares on Facebook pages? Darren Barefoot and Theo Lamb analyzed 1000 posts from large environmental NGOs and are keen to report their findings. Learn who's doing Facebook well, and what really works to increase engagement.

1. How NGOs win on Facebook
Here comes the science

4. thebigwild.org/bigwater

6. ✤ Questions
✤ What kind of content earns the most likes, comments and
shares?
✤ Which organizations are killing it on Facebook?

7. What we did

8. Earthjustice Sierra Club
Surfrider David Suzuki Foundation
Rainforest Action Network Unfriend Coal
350.org NRDC
National Audubon Society Project Aware
Greenpeace USA Leave No Trace
National Wildlife Federation Ducks Unlimited
The Story of Stuff Earth Hour
Earth Rangers WWF Canada
Conservation International Nature Conservancy

12. What we observed

13. Content Types

14. Days of the Week

15. ✤ Other facts
✤ For every 1 comment, there are 3 shares and 11 likes.
✤ External links mostly went to mainstream news sources.
✤ Collectively, the NGOs averaged almost exactly one post a
day.
✤ There was no obvious correlation between day of the week
and post popularity.
✤ Hardly anybody ever uses Facebook Questions.
✤ 18 of the 20 most popular posts were photos.

16. What we figured

17. Engagement =
Likes +
(Comments * 2.5) +
(Shares * 5)

18. Engagement vs. Frequency

19. Engagement
Organizations’ names redacted, to protect the innocent

20. Content Types by NGO

21. Photos and Video

22. Links

24. What we learned elsewhere

28. What we admired

35. Top ten posts:
http://j.mp/NGOFBposts

37. We got 1,000 shares, 180 comments and 342 likes.
The page was also liked by 1,000 more people this
weekend.We can’t attribute this to the image, but we
do know that with 1,000 shares, we got huge exposure
to lots of new Facebook friends.
We also got 3050 visits to the blog from Facebook (out
of 4500 total visits) and 560 people who followed up
and signed our action.
In Facebook Insights, the post is currently second (out
of 158) post for ‘engaged users’ and ‘most talked
about’ for 2012.

38. What we recommend

39. ✤ Recommendations
✤ You’re probably not publishing enough photos and videos.
✤ People like simple evocative messages laid over photos.
✤ Link more often to sites other than your own.
✤ Ask people to share your content sparingly.

40. ✤ More recommendations
✤ Emulate Earthjustice, Surfrider and Rainforest Action
Network.
✤ Engagement in your social media channels probably reflects
engagement across your entire organization, in all channels.
✤ Pair the rich media content with a caption of at least 140
characters. Ergo, post different text for Facebook and
Twitter.

41. Questions?