Happy Friday! If we haven't met before, I'm the Assistant General Manager at Daily Kos. This means I do all sorts of random things, but the biggest chunk of my job is dedicated to managing the Daily Kos Facebook page and the small-but-mighty social media team here. I was excited to see
Richard Lyon's diary the other day, which included questions about the mechanics of Facebook posting and differences between the Daily Kos audience and our Facebook audience, and welcome the opportunity to discuss that kind of stuff here. So hit me with any and all social media-related questions and I'll do my best to answer them.
Today we hit 600K fans on the Daily Kos Facebook page, which is damn cool. Our engagement is consistently even higher than that, which Markos mentioned in his recent August update diary:
Our job is to spread our message and info and activism energy into as many platforms as possible. And since gazillions of people are on Facebook, we are on Facebook too. And we are on there something fierce. Currently, 600,000 people have liked our Facebook page.
But what's crazy is that we have more people talking about Daily Kos content on Facebook than we have likes. Currently, that's over 800K. I dare you to find anyone else who can boast that. For example, Upworthy has 6.9M likes, and yet only 1.3M people talking about their content. Huffington Post has 4M likes, yet just 1.8M people talking about it. I was once cornered at a conference by a Facebook data analyst who said they were studying Daily Kos to figure out what we were doing so effectively. Never found out the results of their study, but the numbers are stark.
And what's more, Facebook balances out our readership nicely. Daily Kos proper, if Quantcast can be believed (and I've seen other metrics suggesting different numbers, so it's all kinda hazy), has our male-female ratio as 61-39. But for those participating on Facebook, it's 39-60 -- the exact reverse. Amazing, huh?
We have over a million people engaging with our content on Facebook weekly—commenting, sharing, clicking the "like" button, etc.—and about 10-15 million people see our content in their newsfeed. In the last week alone, there were over 200K comments on our page. That's considerably more comments than we see on the site these days! Even if you're not pro-Facebook, I hope people are starting to realize Facebook's potential in terms of spreading the terrific work people are doing here to new readers and reaching new audiences.
Some other fun facts about me that have nothing to do with Facebook: I play music and still buy vinyl records; I have a Bengal cat who acts like a dog; and I'm 9 months pregnant with my first and about to pop any day now.