Facebook: Average Journalist Has Seen 320% Increase In Subscribers Since November
On average, journalists using Facebook’s subscribe feature have seen a 320 percent increase in subscribers since November, according to a Facebook analysis of 25 journalists. This sample included local, national and international journalists who report on various platforms.
The growth is coming from social and interest-based discovery, wrote Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalist program manager and Betsy Cameron, a data analyst.
“People discover journalists to subscribe to on Facebook through their friends in News Feed; Facebook search; our “people to subscribe to” recommendations engine (which shows you who your friends are subscribing to and recommends journalists based on your interests); and other organic discovery mechanisms, such as simply seeing who your friends have subscribed to,” they wrote.
Lavrusik and Cameron posted a breakdown of the different types of posts on that journalists were posting on Facebook. Links accounted for 62 percent of posts, a call to action (promotional language like “check this out”) accounted for 30 percent of posts, questions and input accounted for 25 percent of posts, videos accounted for 13 percent of posts and photos accounted for 12 percent of posts.
He also shared what works when publicly posting as a journalist. Humorous posts, he wrote, work well (up to a 5x increase in shares). So do posts with commentary and analysis (as many as 3x as many likes), reader shout-outs (as much as a 4x increase in reader feedback) and powerful photos (as much as 2x the engagement).
However, as Jim Romenesko notes in a just-published post, he feels many of his more than 14,000 subscribers are spam.
Are you a journalist who has Facebook subscribe enabled? What works for you? And who are your favorite journalists to subscribe to on Facebook? Please share in the comment field below!
