EA - A Study of EA Orgs’ Social Media by Stan Pinsent

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Study of EA Orgs’ Social Media, published by Stan Pinsent on January 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryI collected data on the social media accounts of 79 EA-related organisations. Key findings:Orgs have far more followers on Facebook and Twitter than on Instagram. Facebook accounts typically have more followers than Twitter accounts, but this varies between cause areasA number of Longtermism- and Infrastructure-focused orgs have stepped away from social media since 2021On Facebook, posting regularly correlates weakly with having a larger followingOverall, it appears that EA-aligned organisations should consider their cause area within EA when forming a social media strategyMethodologyI checked the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts of each of the orgs on this list of EA-related organisations and collected data on 1) the number of days since last posting and 2) the number of followers. See the footnotes for details on methodology[1] and limitations[2] [Footnotes are included in the main text because the forum is being glitchy].You can find the full dataset here.Data Overview87% of the 79 organisations surveyed have an account on either Facebook, Twitter or InstagramOf the organisations on social media, only 58% had been active in the past weekMost of the organisations use Facebook and Twitter and less than half of them use Instagram:There was a good spread of cause areas in the survey:Cause areaNumber of organisationsAnimal Advocacy12Longtermism15Global Health & Poverty18Infrastructure24Other10Total79Orgs to WatchA number of the organisations stood out for their aptitude on social media. Below are “ten organisations to watch”, with links to their respective accounts:OrgCause areaLinksReasons to watchThe Humane LeagueAnimal AdvocacyRegular posts and diverse content. Strong on all platformsAnimal EthicsFacebook powerhouse. Diverse Instagram content, cross-channel promotionFuture of Life InstituteLongtermismHarnessing clips and quotes from their podcast, highly active on all platformsSightsaversGlobal Health & Poverty40,000 tweets and countingGiveDirectlyPutting a human face on their work on InstagramAbdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Regular, diverse Twitter contentEvidence ActionEngaging visuals with every post80,000 HoursInfrastructureLonger, regular but infrequent Facebook postsHigh Impact AthletesEyeball-grabbing visuals on InstagramOur World in DataOtherMaking data sing on InstagramFBTIGFBTIGFBTIGFBTIGFBTIGFBTFBTIGFBTIGFBTIGFBTIGFollower DataFacebook or Twitter? It depends on the cause area.65% of organisations had more followers on Facebook than on Twitter. Comparing the median value of Facebook followers per Twitter follower within each cause area, we see significant variation (with the caveat that sample sizes are small).It appears that cause area has a strong correlation with which platform an organisation does best in: all Animal Advocacy orgs had more Facebook followers than Twitter followers, while 5 of 8 Longtermist orgs had the opposite trend.Why such a difference between the cause areas? I have a few suggestions:Anecdotally, Facebook is better than Twitter for harnessing broad audiences with shared interests. Animal Advocacy orgs may have been able to snare the audiences of big groups like Greenpeace and the WWF (3.1M and 3.6M Facebook followers respectively). The other cause areas don’t have such big peers to poach from (Oxfam has 1.1M followers, and Longtermism barely exists beyond EA)It seems plausible that Twitter is simply more popular among Effective Altruists. This would explain why the Animal Advocacy movement, within which EAs are a minority, is an exception here (although EAs are also a minority in Global Health & Poverty)Some Longtermist and Infrastructure orgs have...