Just to round up one portion of ’14 – I’ve a summary of how the Irish titles fared in some of the the social wars – Facebook.
Not that Facebook fans are a huge measure of success/failure of a titles social media efforts – it’s simply a metric that people are familiar with and they are comparable. Personally I fit into the “familiar with” as opposed to “comfortable with” category as I notice that some publications in Ireland have around 30% of their fans from Ireland and another 30% from Africa, where, I can assure you, they do not sell.
Moving away from the ‘smoke and mirrors’ that are ‘fans’ it’s interesting to note that the titles under watch here have made very determined efforts to coral fans. In eighteen months the Facebook fan base for the Irish Independent and Times have grown tenfold.
The interaction rates in the titles are poor with only about .02% of ‘fans’ actually contributing in terms of posts (Facebook average is between 1%-2%). There is a better statistic in terms of wider engagement (people talking about rate- PTAR) which in the case of the Irish Independent was close to 50% in December and the Irish Times around 15% . To compare this other media on Facebook; BBC news for example had a 9% PTAR rate, Fox News 34%, New York Times 4% etc. They all vary wildly and could be a reflection of content or fans.
Of all the Facebook pages tracked by Quintly.com the Irish Independent ranks #503 in the Media/News/Publishing category in terms of Likes. However it ranks #64 in terms of PTAR. So in comparison to other media it boxes above its weight on that front. In comparison, the Irish Times ranks #540 in terms of fans but #343 in terms of its PTAR.
| Facebook Likes | ||||
| Dec-14 | Dec-13 | +/- 000 | +/- % | |
| Irish Independent | 245,485 | 55,111 | 190,374 | 345% |
| Examiner | 115,269 | 22,581 | 92,688 | 410% |
| Irish Times | 229,548 | 87,914 | 141,634 | 161% |
