June 4, 2023 Mandeville, La.
The Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative (LICI) released its final figures for the Facebook postings and the number of goggle views for the 2023 Louisiana Iris View Locations map. The map was created jointly between LICI and Common Ground Relief. This was the third year the map was produced and made available online to the public. The final total views of the interactive map for this season's iris bloom was over 34,000.
Photo: The 2023 Louisiana Iris Viewing Locations map can be found by clicking here.
Photo: You can find the current count of how many times the map has been viewed at the upper left corner of the map. This was the count as of the morning of June 4, 2023.
Photo: The ranking of the sites found on the map for the 2023 spring iris bloom.
The map ranks the very best to the almost best for each site found on the map. By clicking on each icon, you will be taken to a page of that location with information and ten photos of the site.
Not all of the sites are the location of one of LICI's iris restoration projects, but most are.
"An important part of LICI's mission is to get people out to the boardwalks and nature trails to see the native wild Louisiana irises in bloom," says LICI's Gary Salathe. "We think this map has been very effective in accomplishing that goal," he adds.
LICI's markets the map in several different ways, but the most effective is the Facebook postings about the map they do regularly on the LICI Facebook page leading up to the iris bloom and while the bloom is happening, according to Salathe. They report that three of their Facebook postings generated over 40,000 post impressions each, which is the number of people whom the posting was shown on their news feed.
Photo: One of three LICI's Facebook postings about the 2023 Louisiana Iris Viewing Locations map that went viral, each getting over 40,000 impressions,
7,500 post engagements and over 1,000 likes.
Photo: "The goal of our map is to get huge numbers of people out to the boardwalks and nature trails to see our wild, native Louisiana irises in bloom. We think
we accomplished that again this year." Salathe says.