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Genocide Awareness Month Engages Big Audience on Social Media

Wed, 05/18/2016 - 5:00pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

USC Shoah Foundation’s social media accounts helped thousands of people around the world share and commemorate Genocide Awareness Month this April with stories, photos, video clips and more.

On Facebook, USC Shoah Foundation reached nearly 140,000 people in April, compared to 74,000 in March. The most popular posts were a clip from Armenian Genocide survivor Hovsana Kumjian’s testimony in which she sings a song, the Institute’s photograph of survivors of five genocides, above, and a story about Aleksan Markaryan, the last survivor interviewed for the Armenian Genocide collection. The page also gained 241 new fans.

Instagram also showed significant engagement, with 71 new followers and top posts that each received nearly 50 likes. Followers were especially enthusiastic about photos of Institute staff, students and survivors posing in the Institute office at USC.

Thousands of people engaged with @USCShoahFdn on social media during Genocide Awareness Month.

April was a very active month on Twitter. The Institute’s tweets reached a whopping 2.28 million users with 1,500 engagements (favorites, retweets) over the course of the month. Many of the most popular tweets were about the Armenian Genocide, which marked its 101st anniversary in April.

In addition, the @USCIWitness account, which posts specifically about the Institute’s education programs, enjoyed a spike in activity for each of the month’s #IWitnessChats, which are moderated by partners like Facing History and Ourselves and Discovery Education and encourage educators to tweet about how they are using IWitness in their classrooms. The account’s total reach for the month was nearly 4 million, compared to 750,000 in March.

Finally, the Institute’s website http://sfi.usc.edu saw an increase in page views from March to April, from 140,000 to 151,000. Visitors spent an impressive average of 4 minutes 12 seconds on the site – most people, according to Chartbeat, only spend 15 seconds on any given website.