Cracking the Code: How Women Engage with Deep Look: A Facebook Science Content Experiment

KQED’s science engagement team is on the front lines of making sure our overall science content, which includes science news and our Deep Look videos, are shared and engaged with on our various social media platforms. One of the platforms we use daily to disseminate our science content is Facebook. To better understand the success of our efforts beyond the usual metrics we track, the science engagement team tested a few Deep Look grant-related research questions using Facebook as a parallel research tool to our grant’s more traditional survey related research. 

More specifically, Facebook’s advertising platform provides us with the tools we need to conduct more in-depth audience research. Similar to other digital advertising tools such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, and others, Facebook allows users to reach an intended audience based on interest, age, gender and location. We launched a few Facebook advertising experiments comparing the success of engaging general audiences versus science-inclined audiences, which is a new process for us. Due to our limited advertising budget we generally optimize our advertising for science-inclined audiences for the most success. For these tests we were interested in finding new science-inclined audiences and audiences we were missing.