Today I got a tweet from Callum Valentine, who is the Social Media Manager for the Internet Party. He had noticed a 45,000 increase in the number of Likes on John Key’s Facebook Page. 

Now, I obviously don’t have access to the insights of John Key’s page, as much as I would love to! But I do have some old screen grabs from my party leader Facebook page post. Since 22 April the likes have climbed from around 98,000 to around 145,000 as of this afternoon.

Now it is true that this is a huge jump, however the claim that it has happened in the space of a week is not true, it was on 7 May that the John’s page hit 100,000 likes. So the climb to 145,000 has taken 2 weeks, not one. Also, I am not totally sold on the idea that it has been caused only by promoted pots.

Last week was budget week, this is always going to generate a lot of traffic and interaction. Particularly if the page is posting heavily. One of the few measures of engagement that I have access to is the Talking About This metric that Facebook display for every page. It is not the most accurate measure, but it is all that I have available. It is a measurement of the number of unique users who have created a story by interacting with a page, such as liking the page, a post, commenting or sharing a post, or things like that. Now, looking at the screen grab above, you can see that for the last 7 days, John’s page has over 23,000 unique users Talking About it. This is half way to the total number of new likes it has had in the last 2 weeks.

There have been a number of posts on the PMs page this week, some have been more successful than others.

All of the posts have received over 700 likes, as well as over 50 shares, bar the photo of him at his desk, which is a profile photo update post.  Every one of these likes or shares will have multiple impressions with friends of those involved.

However, there is one post we haven’t looked at. Which I suspect will have generated a large number of new likes for the page:

Just under 11,000 likes, 1039 shares, and nearly 800 comments. The only social media post in NZ that I know of, off the top of my head, that is remotely close to being this successful is Jacinda’s post about her Easter weekend road trip home, that got 14,000 likes, 662 comments and 477 shares.

With the last two weeks including the lead up to the budget and the budget, with the corresponding increase in social media graphics and engagement, it is not surprising to see a huge increase in the number of likes. I have had posts that got a couple of hundred likes across the photos in the album, and my organic reach was in the mid 10,000s, with around 40 or 50 new likes. With 10,000 likes and 1000 shares on a single post, I would be surprised if the organic reach was below 50,000 and wouldn’t be surprised if the organic reach was over 100,000 from that post alone.

With these sorts of figures, and the content of the posts, I would expect that a significant proportion of the likes gained came from organic reach. I personally have not seen any promoted posts from John’s Facebook page, however that is not a complete measure as it is possible to focus ads on people who do not like the page. But my conclusion is that this increase in likes is a clear example of a return on investment, through polices and graphics that people are willing to share and engage with.

UPDATE:

The National Party Twitter account has replied to Callum and I this morning: