Social Media Monitoring Project Part 1

In February 2020, my life was changed forever. And before you assume, no! It actually wasn't COVID! Maybe it'll make more sense if I rewind a bit. 

I started my academic journey at Worcester State University in Spring 2019. At the time, I told anyone who would listen that I was going to just be a regular commuter (ha ha ha for those who know me now). I had no plans or interest in getting involved on campus at all. I wanted to drive in for class, sit through class, drive back home. That's it.

Then in December 2019, there were two separate instances of swastikas vandalizing a bathroom on my campus. I'm a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors - there was no way I could passively sit by and not get involved. I commend Worcester State for their swift and strong reaction, both via email and via their planning of an antisemitism program which they brought me into. As part of the planning process, I reached out to as many community members as possible to bring the Jewish community in Worcester together. That's how I first got involved with StandWithUs.

StandWithUs is a nonprofit organization that educates people about Israel and fights antisemitism worldwide. I've been following them on social media for years because of their strong presence online fighting misinformation. The antisemitism program led me to connect with their New England Campus Coordinator. That encounter led to me becoming Worcester State University's first ever Emerson Fellow, a prestigious one-year leadership program that educates and empowers students to support Israel and fight antisemitism on their campuses. The experience was transformative and culminated in me taking on the mantle of the New England Campus Coordinator this summer (my dream job!!!), where I'll be working part time until I graduate then transition to full time.

Because StandWithUs' strong social media presence is what first made me aware of the organization, I wanted to dive deeper into analyzing their social media presence. So here we go! And yes, I know it's a lot of information, and I promise I won't be offended if you skim to the videos, screenshots, and links 😉

Background of the Organization

StandWithUs

Let's start with their official mission statement from their website: 

"StandWithUs is an international and non-partisan Israel education organization that inspires and educates people of all ages and backgrounds, challenges misinformation and fights antisemitism.

 

StandWithUs empowers and energizes students and communities with leadership training and educational programs on hundreds of college campuses, high schools, and middle schools. StandWithUs informs through social media, print and digital materials, films, weekly newsletters and missions to Israel.

 

Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the organization has programs on five continents with chapters and offices throughout the U.S., in Israel, the UK, Canada and Brazil.

 

StandWithUs has received the highest ratings from Charity Navigator (4 stars) and Guidestar (Platinum) and is a U.S. registered 501 (c) (3) non-profit and Section 46 charity (Israel).

 

StandWithUs is not politically aligned in any country. It does not and has never advocated specific policies for Israel. Our work and our respect for Israel’s democratically elected government are not contingent on which parties are in power. Our goal is to counter antisemitism and to educate the public about Israel and empower others to educate their communities, and to make it possible to have reasonable, informed conversations about Israel’s policies on campuses and in communities."

Here's another statement from their website about who they are:

"We are inspired by our love of Israel, our belief that education is the road to peace, and our commitment to stand up for Israel and the Jewish people." 

Focus of this blog

Now let's break it down. So StandWithUs is an international nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization. Their Charity Navigator rating is 95.47, giving it four stars for anyone who wants to confirm.

It provides multiple resources and different programs. For the purposes of not making this blog post longer than it needs to be (and for the sake of our busy schedules), the most important part for us to know is that we'll be focusing on their digital footprint because we can easily track it via analytic tools on the Internet. We might run into overlap with some of their other departments based on what type of content is shared digitally on their social media platforms, but we'll focus primarily on analyzing their social media footprint, a la groundswell style.

Side Note: I do want to give a little shoutout to let y'all know about the Campus department because that's where I work! I get to educate and empower student leaders across New England, and with my colleagues, we educate and empower student leaders on campuses across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Pretty inspiring, if I can say so myself.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Social Media Overview

Let's start with some facts about their digital presence (easily verifiable by clicking on any of these links):

• Strong Facebook presence with over 1 million followers.
• Instagram has 330k followers.
• Twitter has over 135k followers.
• YouTube with 17.6k followers
• A YouTube like portal StandWithUs.TV with educational videos
• LinkedIn with under 7500 followers
• A private Facebook group called StandWithUs Digital Ambassadors Group (Official) with 1.6K members
• A Telegram group interested parties can join
• 4 WhatsApp groups users in the US and Canada can join that have limits of up to 257 users

For the purposes of this assignment, we're going to focus as much as we can on US-focused resources, although StandWithUs has resources for multiple countries in multiple languages.

Let's dive deeper into the content of their social media platforms!

Here are three examples of the kind of content we see on their YouTube channel:

The videos are all relatively short and obviously meant to inspire and educate, which is in line with their mission statement. We notice that all three videos also have a pretty consistent look, which we'll see as we move on to the rest of their social media platforms.

Here's their Instagram bio.

If this isn't aesthetically pleasing, I don't know what is. We can see they've got their story highlights the same color as their logo. Their bio clearly says who they are and what they do. They've got 7,191 posts at the time of this screenshot so they actively post content which targets primarily an audience that wants to learn more about Israel, be empowered to fight antisemitism, and be inspired to visit Israel. (Another side note: Israel vacations are legit the best. The food, the beaches, the history - it's just amazing. Back to content). 

Their Facebook page is equally aesthetically pleasing:

Like with their Instagram bio, they're making it clear they're a nonprofit organization. The semiology of the young girls holding the Israel flag definitely sends a clear message about what the organization stands for.

And we see something very similar with their Twitter bio:

Analyzing Digital Presence

So now that we know how StandWithUs presents itself, let's see what the groundswell has to say. To Wikipedia we go!

StandWithUs (SWU, also known as the Israel Emergency Alliance^[2][3]) is an international right-wing^[4][5], pro-Israel advocacy organization headquartered in the United States. SWU was founded in Los Angeles by the family therapist Roz Rothstein and her husband Jeremy in 2001.^[6] As of 2016, it had 18 offices across the US and branches in Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.^[7]"

So here we see that although the organization considers itself nonpartisan, the groundswell has drawn the conclusion that it is a right-wing organization. It also uses the word "advocacy organization" instead of focusing on the educational aspect that StandWithUs focuses on in their mission statement.

One of the things to keep in mind when we look at organizations is that the groundswell may draw conclusions but that we have to take it with a grain of salt. It's no secret that Israel is in the news a LOT and we see a lot of opinions about Israel, some based in fact and others not. Either way, Israel tends to be a contentious topic and because StandWithUs is dedicated to educating about and supporting Israel, we need to keep that in mind when evaluating what the groundswell says about the organization.

Let's look at this interesting GoogleTrends breakdown of interest over the past 12 months in the United States for StandWithUs.

12 month breakdown

We see lots of jumps within the trend over the past 12 months. In May and June of 2021, we see interest hitting 100, the absolute top of the chart. This coincides with the war between Israel and Hamas. We saw an incredible amount of dis- and misinformation making the rounds on social media during this time that led to direct attacks on Jewish communities in the United States. After the war, we saw a new government form the most diverse coalition in the history of Israel, which explains continued spikes. So each spike in interest we see results from a major event happening in Israel and/or major antisemitism happening within the United States.

A SocialSearcher analytics breakdown gives us the following results:

Looking more closely at general content, we see this trend:

At its height, the posts we see are: 15 for Instagram; 1 for YouTube;
101 for Twitter; 11 for Facebook; 4 for Web

SocialSearcher tells us that Monday is the organization's strongest post day, with 47% of posts being shared on Monday.

Here are the results regarding sentiment:

Green means positive sentiment
Red means negative sentiment
Gray means neutral sentiment

It's important to note that the SocialSearcher sentiment breakdown when looking at popular negative posts cites posts that elicited a negative reaction from StandWithus followers because of experiences of antisemitism, bias, or unfair treatment. And we know that anger is the emotion that fuels us the most on the Internet, which explains the high results for the negative sentiment and posts.

Here's an interesting breakdown of users by network percentage.

Twitter is in first place with 28.7% of users, while VKontakte - a Russian social media site - is in second with 26.3%, which is pretty surprising. Despite the large amount of followers, Facebook comes in at 1.6% and Instagram at 0.4%.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

StandWithUs definitely has a strong online presence, characterized by the large numbers of followers on its platforms and the results from our analytics.

Because the negative sentiment is so high, even though positive sentiment is high as well, it evens out to about 1:1. There's an opportunity to increase positive sentiment via online presence.

Some social networks are not as utilized as others, which is an opportunity to expand presence across networks.

A big chunk of the organization's posts go up on Mondays, so there's an opportunity to expand the days of the week, as well as diversify the time of day posts go live.

Despite the large amount of followers on Instagram and Facebook, the analytics tell us that these sites are being underutilized. That could be a threat as in today's attention company, we need to ensure that we keep people's attention. If we don't show up on people's feeds enough, we lose their attention and thus become irrelevant. If we're not on their feed, we don't exist.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog where I'll break down some suggestions for the digital brand based on our experience with the groundswell!

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you! What are your thoughts on StandWithUs' digital presence? How should the analytics inform the recommendations? Why do you think the analytics tell us what they do? What recommendations would you give this organization? Let me know in the comments below!