Check out this infographic from Expert Labs. They used the ThinkUp app to dig into the White House’s Twitter activity.
You can also grab the data yourself and noodle around.
A few of us started discussing it on Twitter, so I thought I’d post it here to give us more space to share thoughts.
I’ll go first: the fact they got X number of @replies indicates interest to me, but not engagement, which I think means two-way involvement. I’m still trying to get a handle on the stats that tell me a story about engagement: what works, what doesn’t, where should we invest meager resources, etc.
One lesson that I do see is that online events like the town hall do raise interest and responses, but without sustained two-way conversation, those go back to pre-event levels pretty quickly. That seems intuitive, but here’s a stats set that demonstrates it.
What stories do you see in this graphic? What questions does it raise?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
The most interesting item was the increase of 650,000 followers on Twitter. A 34.5% increase in followers is insanely huge – that’s priceless. And why it matters is you know have all those followers/audience for your day-to-day tweets – so you reach more people with your mission
Oops…it was 35% for year, the actual event seemed to increase by an additional 13,000 followers or so. Which still isn’t terrible for a one-time event.
Nice infograph. I wonder what they White House did differently to promote the Town Hall and integrate Twitter that led to the spike in replies in July. Also, note the residual impact in August, but the drop off thereafter…while they did achieve a new plateau, how could they have sustained or built upon that interaction?
My questions revolve around whether they replied to any of those @replies. I’m guessing not.
On Twitter, Dominic Campbell pointed out that the infograph also emphasizes “celebrity followers” over meaningful interactions. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a problem, but my bigger issue is still wondering what *should* be we looking at?
I think the PR around WH Town Halls on Twitter and the President on Google Hangout is brilliant. But I have to wonder whether quality engagement ensues afterwards. Are those parties who influence policy engaging directly with constituents? Is there a more transparent dialog with industry as a result of engaging the social streams? It seems that this is more a function of creating news than it is newsworthy.
It would be fun to view a Radian6 dashboard during these mega-events.
@Jeffrey While I’m grateful to you for crediting Govfresh as the source of the infographic, it actually was made by Expert Labs, using data they collected from ThinkUp App. We embedded it, as you did here. Sorry to be tardy with the correction.
Thanks, Alex – corrected!