At Commons, we aim to empower individuals to fight back against the climate crisis through their everyday actions. On our social media, our goal is to create engaging, bite-sized content that dives into the nuances of the climate crisis, educates audiences about climate solutions, and motivates change.
Unlike other brands, our posts seek to educate and engage first and market second. While we want to introduce potential new users to the Commons app, we know that our Instagram exists to serve our audience — to make them laugh, to provoke curiosity, to help them learn, and to inspire them to take action.
Effective, engaging, and accurate climate media can be hard to come by. Oftentimes it’s easier to find misinformation than it is facts and the real science doesn’t reach anyone outside of the hardcore climate community. At Commons, it’s a priority to make content that is visually compelling, sharable, and genuine.
Our social media team consists of three full-time marketers keeping a constant eye on pop culture and climate news. It’s important to us to be immersed in the world that we make content for, not only so we can keep up with topics that our audience is interested in, but also so we can keep a finger on the pulse of how people are feeling about climate change.
We aim to create a variety of content to keep our page fresh and to bring audiences together; for example, someone might come to our account through a piece about AI energy use and eventually find content about plant-based diets that inspires them. On the @commonsearth account, you’ll find data visualizations, memes, deep dives on niche climate topics, environmental memes, excerpts from recent climate news pieces, brand sustainability ratings, inspirational quotes, tributes to nature’s beauty, photo series, op-eds, and hot takes from our team and our community on environmental topics. This depth of content coverage means that our team is plugged into climate news sites, influencers, reddit pages, scientific journals, books, and discourse on other platforms like Twitter (X) and TikTok.
It’s also important to us to create well-designed content, which has sometimes proved difficult. We’ve found that highly designed, editorial content sometimes isn’t “clicky” enough for the algorithm and/or our followers. Still, design is a crucial communication element, so we’ve had to find a balance to keep our posts easy to follow, eye-catching, and visually dynamic enough to stand out.
Generally, dealing with the invisible algorithm of Instagram can prove challenging. An app update may make changes behind the scenes that greatly affect how your audience receives your content. In 2024, Meta rolled out a new policy that limited political content on the app, not showing it to non- followers. For us, this dropped viewership from non-followers, and we had to work to figure out what Meta specifically flagged as political. For the last year and a half, it’s been something we have to keep a constant eye on to discern further. To use this drawback to our advantage, we also were inspired to create a post, “Can climate be apolitical?”
This is something that we do frequently: take trending topics that may not inherently be climate-related and analyze them through a planetary lens. This has lead us to creating successful posts about labubus, Super Bowl ads, Amazon strikes, pride month, and budget bills.
Building a page through constant post output for years has not been easy, but the responses we get from our community about how @commonsearth has helped them reflect on their lives and the way they impact the planet makes it all worth it.
In the past few years, Commons has soared from 8k followers to over 380k. We’ve been able to collaborate with other accounts, brands, and organizations. Our record highs have included months with 30M+ impressions, posts with over 400k likes, and thousands of comments, stories, and DMs from community members telling us how valuable our content has been to them.
As our social media manager, one of the most important metrics of success came for me during the Los Angeles fires in January. As with many big disasters, we made quite a few posts about the wildfires, including a post about how to pack a disaster go-bag. The post garnered over 6 million views and over 100k saves. The idea that over 100,000 people saved that post to use as guidance still shocks me. I like to believe that thousands of people are more prepared for a natural disaster because of that piece of content, and that it could have potentially helped some of the Commons community facing evacuation during those January fires.
On the Commons app, we host monthly Collective Challenges. Our primary method of promotion for these challenges is through our Instagram, where we often collaborate with other brands or organizations to mobilize our communities toward a common goal. In January of this year, we partnered with animal sanctuaries to raise money to save animals all over the country. In November, we partnered with Lonely Whale and Re:wild to raise over $10k for conservation efforts across the globe. Our Instagram is a content platform at Commons, but it’s also a real-life tool that has helped us make a tangible difference for the planet we share.