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Lessons from NPR’s Survey of Its Facebook Fans

In an effort to get to know its Facebook Fans better, NPR recently asked them to participate in a survey. The news outlet’s goal was to get to know its more than one million fans better – and the survey was overwhelmingly successful in helping it achieve this goal with more than 40,000 people participating.

NPR then shared the key findings, which I found to be quite interesting and relevant for the work we are doing for Communiqué PR clients. If you missed this information, it is posted online and can be found here.

A few of the points that I found to be most valuable:

  • NPR learned that its Twitter and Facebook fans appear to be more mutually exclusive than it assumed. “Interestingly, fewer than 1 in 10 (8.4%) follow NPR on Twitter.” This was a surprise to NPR as it has twice as many fans on Twitter than on Facebook.
  • Posting frequency was something NPR struggled with when it first started posting links to news on Facebook. I found this section of NPR’s survey results article to be most helpful as many of our clients ask for counsel about how frequently to share information. Apparently, when the folks at NPR first began using Facebook they were “posting more than 20 items per day.” This proved to be way too much for the fan base. After some trial and error, NPR found the magic number to be around 8-10 posts per day. However, Andy Carvin, senior strategist with NPR’s social media desk, and Noel Cody, internal research with NPR, believe that other publishers of information on Facebook would find that 8 to 10 items would be far too much for their followers and cite research to support this claim.
  • Facebook is a “major way in which [NPR’s] fans receive news and information from NPR.” These people also expect their friends to share news with them.

There are many more observations and conclusions NPR has drawn from its survey. If you are leveraging Facebook or Twitter for your company or organization, I strongly encourage you to read this article and glean for yourself the many  salient points which may be relevant to you.