With all due respect to Maria Von Trapp, she can keep her raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. When it comes to M+R Research Labs, our favorite things are the most useful, shareable, likeable, tweetable posts. So we’ve taken a look back at our stats for 2012 (this is Research Labs, after all — we don’t pour milk on our cereal without checking the stats first) and pulled together the most popular posts of the year.

Here are a few of your — and our — favorite things. Plus bonus song lyrics at the end. Happy New Year!

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What’s up with those red and green chocolates nestled among the remnant Halloween candy? Why do I keep hearing the word “layaway?” Oh. It’s apparently the holidays. Time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and… Giving Tuesday.

Giving Tuesday — scheduled for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, 11/27 — is an initiative by New York’s 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation to symbolize the beginning of the season of giving. It got some early buzz, and we’re guessing that thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, even if your E.D. hasn’t heard of it yet she’ll email you that morning asking, “What are we doing about this?”

With that moment in mind, we put our creative heads together to share a few tips on how to take advantage of this opportunity.

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Big news from Facebooklandia: In addition to targeting Facebook ads by geography and interest, nonprofits can now upload lists of email addresses and target Facebook ads to specific individuals.

This means that, as marketers, we can design ads for specific segments of our list, or even for a single individual, and deliver it straight to her eyes on Facebook. It’s called customized audience ads, and it’s a game changer.

Best part? It’s practically free (kind of).

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It is a truth universally acknowledged: Images rule Facebook. When you’re scrolling through posts about what someone ate for breakfast or how long their commute took, an interesting photo is like an oasis in a desert of digital monotony. And ever since Facebook unveiled large-dimension images in the News Feed last year, brands, organizations, and George Takei have been capitalizing on the new layout with simple images that drive home a point with a funny photo or moving quote. We’ve been calling these “image shares” because well, they’re images… that people share.

There’s no sure way to make your image share go viral and take over the internet. But these simple tips will help you create content that your followers will be eager to share – the rest is up to them.

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Note: This post refers to an archived publication! Visit www.e-benchmarksstudy.com for the most recent versions of all our Benchmarks Studies.

Wow! Once again, you’ve amazed us! Over 450 people joined us for the 2012 Benchmarks Extra: Facebook webinar we co-hosted with NTEN and the Ad Council last week. Thank you again for being such a great audience.

So many people asked interesting and thoughtful questions during the webinar that we wanted to make sure everyone gets a chance to see them and participate in the discussion! Check out the questions and answers below – they should be useful whether or not you were able to attend the webinar last week. Combine all this knowledge with your free copy of the Benchmarks Extra: Facebook study, and you’ll be rocking your organization’s Facebook page in no time!

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