UK Parliament: Our social media stats, one year on

It’s been roughly a calendar year since we started using social media channels here at Parliament. Our strategy around using these platforms will be more clearly defined going forward, but our rationale in using them originally were based around two basic ideas:

1) Linking up with one of Parliament’s primary objectives: to promote public understanding of the work and role of Parliament through the provision of information and access, by

• Informing – ensuring that the public is well-informed about the work and role of Parliament
• Promoting – ensuring that the public values Parliament as an institution
• Listening – engaging the public in ways that reflect their interests

And,

2) Reaching out to people and communities that wouldn’t be visiting the Parliament website.

Evaluation

I realise that stats only tell part of the story, and information on public and internal feedback and traffic back is important. I could write a whole post on the public and internal reaction to us using these tools, but this one is just about the stats. In summary, generally public feedback has been good! And internal departments are now actively looking to use these channels, especially YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

YouTube

• www.youtube.com/UKParliament
• 47 videos on the channel – started posting videos May 2008
• Approx views across all videos: 224,000 (this is views on YouTube,  on our site, or other sites where it’s been embedded)
• Channel views: 67,000+
• Subscribers: 477

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament

• 179,430 views since summer 2008
• Recently we’ve been averaging approx 1000 views per day
• 78% of these views come from users searching on Flickr.com; 13% from Google; 3% from Parliament.uk
• Our most popular image is of the Speaker’s  Table

Twitter

• www.twitter.com/ukparliament
• Regular updates began June 2008
• Followers: 8600
• Updates 1127
• Clickthrough on links (according to bit.ly) is usually over 200. With 519 clickthroughs the highest so far. The stats for any of our bit.ly links can be accessed by copying and pasting the bit.ly URL into a browser window, then adding ‘+’.

Facebook

www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/UK-Parliament/16553417732

Launched June 2008 – 739 fans

We’re starting to do more with our Facebook page, ie, updating it regularly. And it would be good to look at the possibility of developing apps like Number 10 have.

FriendFeed

http://friendfeed.com/ukparliament

Launched August 2008, aggregating all our social media content, and stories from our news area – 284 subscribers.

UK Parliament Google Profile

www.google.com/profiles/ukparliament

Our Google Profile links off to the main areas of the Parliament website and our social media content. Stats are only available for the last 30 days:

Impressions 12438; 1958 Views

Parliament Labs blog

• http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/
• 10,000+ views since launching September 2008
• 312 views in one day – for our improving Hansard post – is our busiest day so far.
• 52 posts
• 84 comments from members of the public and Web Centre staff across all posts.

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