Choose Your Dance: Assessing the Reach of Russian MFA’s Viral Video
On Wednesday, September 5, 2018, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation released a video, apparently intended to go viral. In the video, two clips are juxtaposed next to each other: Maria Zakharova, Official Representative of the Russian MFA, dancing Kalinka back in May 2016 and a more recent dance by Theresa May in Kenya. On Facebook, the caption below the video asks users: “Choose your dance style in international relationship.”
The video was posted around noon, Moscow time, on several MFA’s official social media accounts. Specifically, it was posted on MFA’s Facebook page, English, Russian, and Spanish Twitter accounts, VKontakte community, Russian Telegram channel, Ministry’s bilingual Instagram account and Maria Zakharova’s personal Instagram account. The video was not posted to Ministry’s English Telegram channel nor to its Arab Twitter account.
Notably, it was not uploaded to Russian MFA’s official YouTube channel. The latter means that no single video was shared across all accounts, rather the video was uploaded individually to each platform. Hence, there are no cumulative figures for how many views the video has garnered so far. Instead, there are view counts for each upload. This means that we can compare how many views the video got on each platform.
The findings are presented in the table below. Views numbers were collected approximately 24 hours after the video was released. Note that for Russian MFA’s Facebook the number of followers is that of how many users follow its official page (as contrasted from people who like the page which is 6,000 higher). Language is the main language used by the corresponding account (MFA’s Instagram is bilingual, as all posts have captions in both Russian and English). Maria Zakharova’s Instagram is added to the list because unlike in Facebook there is no proper sharing function on Instagram, so when Zakharova reposted the video from MFA’s account she basically uploaded the video once again and it had a separate view count from the original one (on Facebook, when she shared the video the views added to the same count).
The views per follower figure is imperfect as it does not reflect multiple ways in which video might appear in a non-follower’s feed. Yet, it is one way to assess the efficiency of using a particular social media platform.
These figures show that in 24 hours the video garnered slightly more than 400 000 views total via all of the reviewed platforms. Most views via Facebook page(137 000), English Twitter account(86 100), and Maria Zakharova’s Instagram account(56 771). Spanish Twitter account garnered only 722 views, which can be explained by Russian MFA’s relatively late arrival to Spanish part of Twitterverse.
While Telegram channel garnered the second least number of views, it has the highest views per follower figure (0,545). It is followed by MFA’s English Twitter account (0,446) and, again, Maria Zakharova’s Instagram account (0,430). The power of Maria Zakharova’s personal image is also reflected in her having the same number of followers on Instagram as the Ministry. Russian Twitter account boasts more than a million followers, yet it garnered comparatively small number of views and has the lowest views per follower rate.
