Apparently animals rule Facebook NFP Pages.

According to a brand-new study just released today by San Francisco’s M + R Strategic Services, Facebook Pages dedicated to Not-for-Profit organizations that were dedicated to animal health and welfare experienced the most growth (129%), followed closely by pages to do with rights (118%). NFP Facebook pages experienced 70% growth over all.

Here are a couple of other key findings:

• For every 1,000 Facebook fan page users, on average there were 197 people each day – fans or not – who came across content associated with the nonprofit’s page; 22 ‘People Talking About This’ each week; and 6 ‘Daily Page Engaged’ users per day.

• Viral Facebook activity accounted for 32% of a fan page’s overall daily total reach, meaning that about 1-in-3 people saw an organization’s content because a friend created a story about the fan page.

This is really great news. It means that not-for-profit organizations are starting to really recognize that social media tools like Facebook are useful for creating engagement, marketing and fundraising.

You can download the entire E-Nonprofit Benchmarks Study: Facebook here.