The successes and failures of our fact-based experiment
Lessons from The Economist’s attempt to inject some more facts into Twitter and Facebook
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” declared English writer Aldous Huxley. In fact, it’s precisely when they are disregarded that they become all the more important. The dangers of misinformation are real, and increasingly common as social media becomes ever more a venue for post-truth politics. It is therefore up to publications such as The Economist to act as guardians of the truth, separating facts from commonly held falsehoods.
In this spirit we began six weeks ago to promote striking facts from our newspaper. The experiment — called Fact of the Day — aimed to drive social media engagement by sharing nuggets of our globally focused, fact-based journalism. Finding interesting facts and figures in our newspaper was easy enough. They’re in abundance throughout. We have since been tweeting and posting one per day using our trademark red cards. Here’s an example:
Of course, one viral post does not make a successful social format. Figuring out if there is an appetite for these facts, and, if so, how best to share them, has been a challenge. But six weeks on, we have some findings we’re ready to share.
Lessons
As with any experiment, measuring success is fundamental. Two fairly straightforward metrics employed on social media to measure content engagement are shares and reach. When more of our followers feel that our work is good enough to share with their own networks, we know we’re doing something right.
Over the six weeks of testing, the average number of retweets on our output as a whole was 88 per tweet. As we had hoped, our facts performed markedly better — an average of 133 retweets per tweet. This tells us that our followers were more willing to share our Facts of the Day than our standard tweets.
Facebook was a different story. Over a shorter test period of four weeks, the average reach for our facts was half that of the average post. As tends to be the case on Facebook, the distribution was more spiky than on Twitter, which meant the propensity for a post to be either a standout hit or a disastrous miss was far greater. (This is a consequence of Facebook’s algorithm, which shows each post to a small subset of followers, and then only shows it to more followers if it generates a sufficient number of likes, comments and shares.)
What didn’t work
Some similarities in the over- and under-performing facts have become apparent. For starters, convoluted and wordy facts performed poorly on both platforms. Part of the appeal of this format is providing a quick-hit takeaway packaged in a simple red card. We had a hunch this would be the case, and tried our best to avoid this pitfall by adding additional context in the tweet or post copy.
Niche facts that were very local also under-performed. The fascinating statistic below on baby names completely bombed on both platforms, perhaps because it was only relevant to Britons. Jeremy Corbyn may be the leader of Britain’s opposition party, but he is performing so badly that even news of his cuddly namesakes cannot make him, or our post, more popular.
The next failure to consider is Facebook, where these facts performed poorly relative to other posts. Perhaps by sharing them as link posts, we were essentially splitting users’ choices: either click to read the whole story or share the post. We could try sharing our Facts of the Day simply as picture posts without a link. While this wouldn’t drive traffic to our website, it would still help to engage users with our content, and encourage them to share it with their networks, which helps us to reach more people. This would unfortunately sacrifice the additional context that features in the article. This may have to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
What worked
Now for the good news. The format’s success, especially on Twitter, highlights what we’re doing right. Our best-performing facts tended to be impressive statistics of global relevance and, most importantly, striking and unique. I don’t mean just a fact that is difficult to believe — I mean a fact that is unbelievable.
There is much to build on. We may tinker here and there, but ultimately we’ve found a successful new format to push on Twitter at least. Since Facebook wasn’t receptive, perhaps we should try our facts on other platforms. We’ve also gained useful experience for testing future ideas.
Archer Hill is a social media writer at The Economist.
