On Facebook, our top goal is to create a safe digital learning space where we can provide medically accurate, nonjudgemental sexual health information.
At Planned Parenthood, we know sex education works best when it's welcoming, understandable, and engaging. On Facebook, we seek to leverage the platform's strengths as a facilitator for discussion and post sharing to create a safe, non-judgemental space where users can learn, explore, and share sexual health information. We accomplish that on Facebook by closely moderating discussions on our posts, adhering to Facebook best practices, and ensuring our content is on-brand yet memorable.
Before we share content with our followers, it's reviewed by experts in public health at Planned Parenthood to check for both medical accuracy and health literacy considerations. This way we can be confident that the information we share is up to date and easy to understand.
Sometimes the concepts we discuss on our page are complicated or the topics are repetitive, so we do our best to use creative and unique visuals to illustrate the topics. We do this by closely collaborating with our Creative team to make engaging images and videos on our topics, so that users can relate to the content better and improve information retention.
Ultimately, users come to us on social media to interact with the Planned Parenthood brand directly — whether it's to find out ways to support our organization or to ask health questions. Knowing this, we monitor our Facebook page closely to answer questions, direct users to resources, and to remove disruptive or abusive comments.
2017 proved to be a challenging year in the reproductive health space, leading to massive social media engagement from our supporters. This change is especially apparent on Facebook, where our follower count jumped from 520,275 on January 1, 2017 to 828,019 on December 31, 2017. We observed major growth in followership at several points in the year, with the largest growth happening January 21, 2017— the day of the Presidential inauguration and first national Women's March; on this day alone we gained 11,727 net likes.
The energy from supporters was also reflected in 2017's's content performance, where we saw several major spikes in Facebook engagements.The biggest of these jumps was observed on April 15th on a post about 20 week abortion bans. The timely post reached over 1.8 million users and received 36,398 engagements (including reactions, comments, share, and clicks), far surpassing our post averages in the past.
There was also higher than expected performance observed early in the year. On January 13th, a post about the impact of defunding reached 584,266 users and received 24,712 engagements. On the day of the Women's March we shared an image about the demonstration that reached 611,059 users and received 32,534
engagements.
