Accomplishments: Alas, I might have been too optimistic in my stated goals. When I started, we had 1,356 Facebook ‘Likes’ and 600 Twitter followers. I was out for the first two weeks of November on vacation, so I didn’t start until Nov. 15. Add a holiday, no help or time allotted; getting ready for the move to Troy (redesigning the Spanish paper) and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.
Metrics:
Facebook ‘Likes’ People hiding Freeman page from feed Twitter followers
Oct. 30, 2010 1,356 127 600
Nov. 29, 2010 1,513 136 826
The insights above right, from Facebook, also show that more ‘interactions’ foment many more ‘comments’ and ‘likes’ than simple postings of stories. In other words, someone has to monitor pages in case of tips, comments, questions and such. And currently, I’m the only one doing that (just because I hate it when somebody asks us a question and it sits there for days without monitoring – I myself have two other pages to administer: Preview magazine and my own).
The site had 49,182 entries via Facebook from Nov. 1 to 29, but only 1,000 entries via Twitter, comparably unchanged from last month (although much larger than previous months).
I’m also including some page view stats vs. unique monthly visitors to show our growth:
Page views Monthly Unique visitors
Nov. 2009 1,092,314 127,496
Oct. 2010 1,500,583 179,930
Nov. 2010 1,552,388 196,384
What I did:
For Twiter, I decided not to do the “follow-everyone, unfollow-everyone-who-doesn’t-follow-you back” thing, as it goes against Twitter’s stated policy. I did carefully follow potential local sources (a lot of them, which – I found out later – also is against Twitter policy) and then curated them into lists. We did get a lot of Twitter followers that way, but not as many as if I had just followed everyone I ran into. I didn’t want to do that anyway, because they would be irrelevant followers. The problem is the time that it takes to do this.
I’ve been going to relevant Twitter users (found in competing media and in our own followers’ lists) and have been scrapping their potentially useful followers who are likely to follow back.
I’m using Twitter Karma (http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/) to find out who follows and who doesn’t, but I suspect Twitter Analytics, which will be released early next year, will make Twitter management easier to do.
For Facebook, I used a variety of methods. I friended as many people as possible who have 50 or more common friends to our Preview profile (different from the page), waited a couple of days and then suggested they like the Freeman. That seems to have been working (if you do it right away, they might unfriend you!).
I also put a Quick Reponse code on the Front page of the Freeman on Nov. 16, running through November, using Likify.net, but it only gathered eight likes. The good side of that is that, well, it’s eight people we might not have gotten otherwise, and that it doesn’t require more work than the initial posting. So it could potentially work better with posters and flyers. I think we should probably approach this like the McDonalds does McRibs: If it’s out there all the time, people won’t eat it anymore. But if you issue it every now and then, with added content, people will go back to it.
And I had Dawn put our combined Twitter stream and Facebook page widgets on our main page.
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What you've taught: Droid, baby! For November, reporter Paul Kirby took over the iPad from Patricia Doxsey; and I gave her the droid so she could live-tweet Black Friday not only with tweets but with photos. We used Storify to re-publish her tweets and photos (since she had started close to 4 a.m., we didn’t expect many to be reading then). And the print edition of the Freeman used her photos taken from the droid (I maxed out the photo settings). We had a regular story published by 11 a.m., with video (taken by another reporter). Patti would have used Ustream for Black Friday mayhem, but there was none. Paul has been using the iPad to post directly to the site many times now. I created an app – or shortcut – for TownNews on the main iPad page, which –as crazy as it sounds – makes posting much more comfortable.
What you've learned: Implementation of Quick Response codes; setting up a Livestream channel for Facebook (you can’t do that with Ustream); hooking up Qik and Livestream accounts with Facebook and Twitter.
Side project: Quick response codes.
After doing the Likify experiment I decided to use Quick Response codes to allow people to watch our Life videos right on their phones by simply scanning the paper. This actually seems to have worked better. I posted a promo video using Xtranormal (which by itself gathered some notice); posted it on Facebook and blog about the new feature.
I had to post the videos on YouTube, however, because Flash won’t play on Blackberries or iPhones. I’m hoping HTML-5 will solve this or that we get a better platform for our videos.
Stats:
Views, from YouTube: 134 via mobile devices for seven videos with QR codes, for a total of 32 unique visitors overall. This includes my test views and visits.
I don’t know what to make of Omniture video numbers. I know large play count comes from the much-derided auto-play feature, but the low number of unique visitors should raise a flag. My hunch is that I’m reading the stats wrong.
Finally, some mobile visits:
Oct. 2010: 57,086 entries from 147 devices.
Top 10:
1. | Apple iPhone  | 18,189 | 31.9% | ||||
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2. | Apple iPad | | 8,948 | 15.7% | |||
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3. | RIM BlackBerry 8330 | | 5,312 | 9.3% | |||
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4. | Apple iPod Touch | | 5,231 | 9.2% | |||
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5. | Motorola Droid | | 3,328 | 5.8% | |||
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6. | Motorola DroidX | | 1,225 | 2.1% | |||
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7. | RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 | | 1,146 | 2.0% | |||
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8. | RIM BlackBerry 8530/Curve | | 1,080 | 1.9% | |||
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9. | HTC Droid Incredible | | 1,052 | 1.8% | |||
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10. | LG Ally | 796 | 1.4% | ||||
Nov. 2010*: 62,369 from 163 devices.
*(as of 9 p.m. Nov. 29)
Top 10:
1. | Apple iPhone | | 19,601 | 31.4% | |||
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2. | Apple iPad | | 11,109 | 17.8% | |||
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3. | Apple iPod Touch | | 5,715 | 9.2% | |||
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4. | RIM BlackBerry 8330 | | 5,393 | 8.6% | |||
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5. | Motorola Droid | | 2,649 | 4.2% | |||
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6. | Motorola DroidX | | 1,426 | 2.3% | |||
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7. | HTC Droid Incredible | | 1,270 | 2.0% | |||
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8. | RIM BlackBerry 8530/Curve | | 1,150 | 1.8% | |||
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9. | HTC Evo | | 1,123 | 1.8% | |||
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10. | Motorola Droid2 | | 955 | 1.5% | |||
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