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This is a follow up to Alistair’s original post and will provide a statistical snap shot of how Parliament’s social media is doing and how things have moved on since Alistair’s original post in June 2009.
YouTube
- www.youtube.com/UKParliament
- 69 videos on the channel - another 22 since June 2009.
- Approx views across all videos: 499,000 (this is views on YouTube, on our site, or other sites where it’s been embedded) – that’s more than double the figure in June.
- Channel views: about 92,000 – up 25,000 from June.
- Subscribers: 852 – up 385 from June.
Flickr
www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament
- 456,376 views since summer 2008 – that’s up about 275,000 from Junes figure (179,430)
- Recently we’ve been averaging approx 500 views per day.
- 51% of these views come from users searching on Flickr.com; 41% from search; 4% from other sites (1% from Parliament.uk) – this is a big change from June with many more views coming from search rather than Flickr and other website.
- Our most popular image is still the photo of Speaker’s Table.
- www.twitter.com/ukparliament
- Regular updates began June 2008.
- Followers: 16,182 – that’s almost double June’s figure.
- Updates: 1796 – another 650 in the last six months.
- 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 ‘+’.
www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/UK-Parliament/16553417732
Launched June 2008 – currently 2,549 fans up from 739 in June.
FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/ukparliament
Launched August 2008, aggregating all our social media content, and stories from our news area – 819 subscribers up from 284 in June.
Parliament Labs blog
- http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/
- Due to staff changes and work pressures we have not been contributing to the blog as much as we used to, this will hopefully change in 2010.
- 15,000+ views since launching September 2008 – up 5,000 since June 2009.
- 312 views in one day – for our improving Hansard post – is still our busiest day so far.
- 54 posts – that is only 2 more since June (!!).
- 104 comments from members of the public and Web Centre staff across all posts.
For those of you interested in stats I will be publishing a digest of stats for the Parliamentary website in 2009 shortly…
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
- 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 ‘+’.
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.
The Find Your MP service has been revised. The service uses the new site design and a simplified interface: you can now search for your MP’s details using a postcode, constituency name or Member name from a single search box.
The aim during the development of the service was to remain transparent, publicly visible and accountable. Wherever possible, the choice was made to use open source technologies – and to make code and data available, unless legally constrained. The project was delivered using a set of tools and services that have supported our preferred lightweight working practices:
- Distributed version control: git, publicly available and hosted on github
- Issue tracking: Google Code project hosting
- Communication: team members on Twitter, project updates having their own account at @fymp
- Web framework: Apache and Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails (using ZenTest and Cucumber for testing and spec assurance), MySQL Community Server
- Hosting and storage: Amazon S3, EC2
- Virtual machine construction: Elastic Server
- Load testing: siege
We worked with the good folks from Tweetminster recently to put together a custom iFrame widget that we could use on the Parliament website.
This involved styling the widget Tweetminster already make available so that it fitted with the look of our new redesign, and specifying what Twitter feeds it would use. We wanted the widget to be ‘Parliament on Twitter’ – so it uses our own @ukparliament feed, any MPs or Peers that use Twitter (are there any Peers using Twitter yet?), but no parliamentary candidates, government departments or political parties.
The hope is that using this widget will further promote how Parliament and its Members are trying to engage with social media tools and with the public. During recess it should also give an insight into the work of MPs in their constituencies. Although, we have included a disclaimer because the Web Centre team is responsible only for the content of @ukparliament updates, not those from Members…
WordPress.com doesn’t like iFrames so below is just a screengrab, to see it working go to our new Get Involved page.
