Nonprofits’ Engagement Drops 50% in Q1; PETA’s Instagram Growth Up 55%

During the past few weeks, we’ve looked at the Q1 social activity of B2Bs and B2Cs. Usually we’ve seen the number of pieces of social content posted decline as consumer engagement, shown as actions in this chart, held steady or rose slightly, indicating a brand strategy of quality over quantity.

This week, using Shareablee data provided exclusively to PR News, we examine nonprofits’ social activity for the recently completed quarter and find the story is one featuring engagement and audience size.

In the quarter, U.S. nonprofit brands generated a total of 148 million consumer actions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This compares favorably to the 18 million consumer actions we saw last week for B2B brands (PRN, April 24), but B2C’s 2.1 billion consumer actions ( PRN, April 17) dwarf it.

The nonprofits saw a 50% drop in engagement compared to Q1 2017. Interestingly, despite a major drop in content production, audience figures rose 20% year over year, says Shareablee’s Ron Lee.

Facebook and Twitter saw a 65% and 23% fall in consumer engagement for the quarter, respectively. Instagram, though, gained 27% in engagement, says Lee, despite a drop in content posted of 8%.

Consumer actions per post dropped for Facebook and Twitter while Instagram rose a healthy 37%.

Instagram Engagement Up 55%

In terms of individual brands, No. 1 PETA garnered some 10 million consumer actions, a 21% drop from the previous year’s Q1 figure. Where it grew was on Instagram, where PETA posted 6% fewer pieces of content but grew consumer engagement 55%.

The 7 million consumer engagements the Women’s March garnered was off 60%, though its audience count rose a whopping 1000%.

Oceana Joins The Top 10

Ocean conservation and advocacy organization Oceana is a new addition to the top 10 list. Despite a 7% drop in content posted during the quarter vs. the same period in 2017, Oceana posted consumer engagement growth of 108%, spread across Facebook (33%), Twitter (131%) and Instagram (115%).

Video played a huge part in its success, Lee notes, as it increased video content 278%, leading to a 197% increase in video actions and an astounding 1,874% increase in video views.

Mercy For Animals, the No. 5 organization on the list with 4 million consumer actions (down 35%), increased video content 87%.