How a Cheese and Potato Pie went viral

The Bosworth Community Centre Digital Media Report July 2016

Background

The Bosworth facebook page has been active for around 2 years — with a very modest input from us over that time. Reaching ‘100 likes’ was a big milestone — it enabled us to access quite a bit of analytics data that facebook records about our page.

Our facebook page is useful to us for several reasons. It gives people a way of getting in touch with us and finding out some basic information (like where we are). We do have a webpage, but it is part of the Accord Group website — and we don’t have direct control over editing it. This makes having a facebook page all the more important. If people search for us on the internet we want them to be able to find up-to-date information and get in touch with us easily.

Why a Cheese and Potato Pie is a hit on facebook, but not twitter

Our other arm of social media is twitter. We connect our facebook and twitter. Normally we will tweet, and then that tweet goes direct to our facebook page. Twitter and facebook have different audiences. Our twitter followers are generally organisations, our audience on facebook is mostly local people.

This is a key difference. Over the last few months, our most successful tweet was a poster about a WW1 exhibition. It was retweeted 9 times and had 2,696 impressions. The same poster on facebook, also did pretty well and reached 869 people. However, it wasn’t our most successful facebook post in the same time. That honour belonged to a picture of a volunteer with a freshly made cheese and potato pie. On twitter it was retweeted 4 times and had 523 impressions, but on facebook it went big and reached 1,010 people!

Why this difference? My guess is organisations (on twitter) responded better to a poster advertising an event, but people (on facebook) responded better to a picture of somebody they knew. (Although there is the possibility that people on facebook really like pictures of cheese and potato pies…)

Other analytics

There is a wealth of information accessible through facebook’s analytics.

We’re popular among the young ladies

We know that around 75% of people who come into Bosworth are female. Our facebook fanbase is even more female dominated with a whopping 82% female. It’s also a generally younger audience than our footfall suggests our physical visitors are.

If you’re looking at our facebook page, you’re probably on your mobile

Continuing a general trend, most people accessing our facebook are doing so on a mobile device. It’s good for us to remember this to make sure the content we put on there is appropriate for mobile users (with smaller screens).

You’re most likely to be on facebook at 9pm on a Saturday

Our fans are consistently online throughout the week. Saturday is the most popular day, but there’s not much in it. Interestingly after an early morning peak of 8am, there’s then a gradual upward curve throughout the day that peaks at 9pm as the most popular time for our fans to be online. So, if we want the most people to see our content, the evening would be the best time to post.

People are waking past us at 3am on facebook

Perhaps the most freaky of all the facebook analytics (if I've understood correctly) is this: facebook can tell us what time people are using facebook who are coming within 165 feet (50 metres) of us. Perplexingly there are people throughout the night on facebook nearby to us! My guess is it is the night staff at the Day Centre opposite, but I haven’t enough evidence to be sure enough to dob them in. Perhaps more usefully, the numbers peak around 8am and 3pm, not surprising as we have a primary school close by — but a useful reminder that there are plenty of people waiting around immediately outside at these times — a captive audience that we could engage with.