Social Media Work Update DEC 2022

21.12.2022

Family & Life’s Facebook platforms are the largest in Ireland and growing every day. They are one of our most powerful resources in creating a culture of life and saving babies, and they exist thanks to the generous support of you and other supporters. 

In the past two weeks, a variety of well-designed arguments were designed and published on Facebook by our media team. Over two million people saw our pro-life content, an incredible number for a small team with a large digital footprint. 

In assessing the quality of our work, one metric we look for is “reactions”. Reactions occur when individuals engage with our content by either sharing it with friends or commenting on the topic posted. We post multiple topics, so looking at reactions is a good gauge of what is reaching and interesting people and what isn’t. 

Some of our posts were “reacted to” over a thousand times on multiple occasions, with one infographic, The Stages of Human Development, viewed by 320,000 people. It received 12,000 reactions, and was shared by friends 6,000 times! This one post generated over 2,000 individual comments, the vast majority of which were positive. As you can imagine, the team spends a lot of time answering questions and moderating content. 

Each post developed by the team is educational, and designed to change people’s minds on abortion, and show them the reality of what actually goes on. A post could be a quote from an abortion survivor, a former abortionist turned pro-life, the testimony of someone who suffered after abortion, or it could be pro-life related news regarding a Family & Life event or a video of one of our talks. 

Thanks to you we’ve been able to deal with queries from girls who were contemplating abortion and changed their mind after witnessing our content. Others have shared it with their friends and family who were once pro-abortion.

Other Platforms Proving Valuable for Life: Instagram is not the same as Facebook but is a social media platform with a massive younger audience, the under 30s, making it a prime target of our team. These are the people whose young minds encourage them to defend life. Facebook is considered the platform for those over 30. Every week, tens of thousands of people view our posts on Instagram. Its content is very different too, being mostly photo shots and short videos. 

The latest phenomenon in social media is the app, TikTok, which consists of sharing short videos on mobile phones. TikTok has a massive young audience (under 20s), so the pro-life message has the potential to reach a generation very vulnerable to the persuasion of the abortion movement. We have recently started posting pro-life videos on this platform but it will take us some time to build up experience in this area. With your support and prayers we can be as successful here as we are on other platforms. 

We have found that videos are a powerful tool for communicating the pro-life message, especially to younger audiences. We’ve had very successful video campaigns in the past, including short social media adverts of the former abortionist turned pro-life activist, Dr 

Anthony Levatino. His story of how he walked away from the abortion industry received a very good reaction, especially from members of the medical profession. 

This month, we posted a number of videos, including an amazing educational video of a unborn baby in utero at just 18 weeks. In the video you can see just how alive are babies in the womb and the unmistakable details of fingers, toes, face and blood vessels. It’s a video that upends every pro-abortion argument, and most people who watch it cannot deny that what they’re looking at is a human life.

Breaking the Consensus: Our very popular interviews with well known opinion formers is in its third year of operation. Those interviewed range across a broad spectrum of people—pro life activists, lawyers, humanitarians, journalists, scientists and many more. 

Across all platforms, these interviews attract hundreds of people every time to participate in the live event. Just this month, we had an interview with the veteran journalist, Mary Kenny speaking about her new book, The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland since 1922. Just before that, we interviewed leading Pro-Life activist, Vicky Wall who described the challenges the pro-life cause is facing since the Repeal of the 8th Amendment. 

The most recent interview in early November was Fr Charles Nyameh who spoke about the bloody persecution of Christians in Nigeria, and why it goes unreported in western countries like Ireland. Please tune in and watch the interviews, and encourage your friends and family to hear the truth unfiltered.