From July 7 to 26 we tried something new on our Facebook page by sharing one Cranky Uncle cartoon each day for 20 days in a row. There were two reasons for doing this: firstly, we wanted to ensure that at least one post would get published each day while I was on vacation, so we needed something we could prepare and schedule well in advance. And secondly, these cartoons are meant to be shared, so this was as good an opportunity as any to do just that!
Each cartoon posting followed the same format which included the title, the fallacy depicted, the fallacy description and an example as shown for "Arsenic" which kicked things off on July 7:
We didn't really know how this series would be received and we wouldn't have been surprised if it basically just sizzled. What then happened took us quite by surprise and we'll share some insights below.
It was fun to watch how the various stats for each cartoon started to go up almost as soon as they were posted. The cartoons got commented on and - especially gratifying! - got shared quite a bit compared to other posts. Facebook provides several metrics via which page owners can judge how well posts are doing and some of these cartoons were doing really well as you can see in the overall stats shown below. The following three cartoons did the best overall by "impressions", but some others performed better for some of the individual metrics, like comments or shares.
Ranked #1 according to impression is the 2nd post in the series, the "Boiling Frogs" cartoon depicting the anecdote fallacy. It really took off reaction-wise, ending up as one of our most successful postings to date:
2nd place - but with a wide margin - goes to post #17 in the series, the "Past Climate Change" cartoon depicting the single cause fallacy:
3rd place goes to the 5th post in the series, the "Dark Night" cartoon, also depicting the anecdote fallacy:
For those of you interested in even more details, here are the stats provided by Facebook for each of the cartoons as captured on July 28. These are obviously somewhat skewed in favor of the cartoons going out first but still show that the series was rather popular with even the later cartoons garnering a few thousand impressions within just a few days (click image for larger view).
Some questions for you: Did you happen upon this series on Facebook either on our page or somewhere else? If you did, what was your reaction? Do you have suggestions what other of our content we could turn into similar consecutive postings? Please share your answers to these questions in the comments!
Posted by BaerbelW on Friday, 5 August, 2022
 |
The Skeptical Science website by Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. |