In President Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress last week, he made a familiar argument for swift climate action: “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.” This framing seems to have brought some considerable success to climate groups’ social media engagement, especially on Facebook.
Climate Reality in particular seemed to have enjoyed engagement success on Facebook following President Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress. We think they can thank Biden’s “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.” framing for that success, as The Wilderness Society and the League of Conservation Voters made successful posts on Facebook featuring a Grist article about California’s Climate Action Corps.
Polluting groups, notorious for making the misleading argument that fossil fuel development is better for job creation, seem to have ceded ground to Biden’s framing for now. Among polluters’ pages we’re tracking, only the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and Minnesotans for Line 3 posted about jobs, and neither post performed particularly well.
FWIW, the single most overperforming post in the U.S. on Facebook about jobs comes from Automotive News with an article about Toyota building a new plant in Indiana.
Overall, among climate and conservation groups, the most overperforming posts from the past week were ones that celebrated the progress being made on climate action at a federal level and posts about the beneficial outcomes of said progress, according to data from Crowdtangle.
(For the mathematically inclined, you can read up on how Crowdtangle calculates over and underperformance here.)
Here are the top five overperforming posts from climate groups on Facebook last week:
Climate Reality
NRDC
NRDC
NRDC
National Wildlife Federation
On Instagram, we saw a similar trend - but given the intersectionality of many climate groups and the activist-oriented preferences of progressive audiences on the platform, we weren’t surprised to see that some of the most overperforming posts discuss labor rights and police abolition.
Here are the top five overperforming posts from climate groups on Instagram last week:
350.org
Sunrise Movement
Rainforest Action Network
350.org
Greenpeace