Administrators of Facebook pages have at their disposal a set of advanced statistical tools to track and study the engagement of its users. However, if they want to compare their own performance in relation to similar institutions or competitors, they are forced to seek the paid services of analyst firms. Alternatively, they may refer to the data from another source, i.e. Facebook’s API. This is exactly the way we decided to check whether researchers or cultural event organisers can gain a basic understanding of any fan page, while performing their own studies and visualisations.
Karol Piekarski, Waldemar WęgrzynStudy
For the pilot study, we selected the pages of several major Polish institutions that emerged as part of bids of Polish cities for European Capital of Culture, such as the City Culture Institute of Gdańsk, Katowice: City of Gardens, Kraków Festival Office, Workshops of Culture in Lublin and last year’s capital city, Wrocław 2016. The subject analysis included all posts that were published by these institutions since their launch on Facebook. The information available to us included only basic post data, such as the date of publication, content and post type (e.g. event, link, image) and the number of interactions (likes, comments and shares).
| Data type | Fb data key | Random data |
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Data from the service was acquired using the R package and a dedicated Rfacebook library. The problem with the publicly available content, however, is that although it spans a substantial period of several years, it is unfortunately much less detailed than the statistics held by page administrators. It is a common feature of large data sets, and especially of content obtained from social media, that although abundant, they are usually lacking in nutritive value (e.g. we have a list of several thousand participants of an event, but we have no idea where they come from, how old they are, etc.). The challenge for analysts is to transform this seemingly interesting content into knowledge that would be useful to researchers and cultural event organisers.
| Institution | Short name | First post |
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Since the audited institutions are among the leading cultural actors in their respective cities, we were particularly interested to know how they manage their social media presence, that is how often and what kind of posts they publish, as well as what interest these post enjoy based on generated user likes, shares and comments (which, for the purpose of the study, were summed up and referred to collectively as user interactions). Unfortunately, as researchers without page administrator privileges, we do not have access to more detailed data on the reach of posts.
| Page | Interactions | Post type | Publication date | Likes | Comments | Shares | Link |
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Let us start by looking at the number of page likes, i.e. the approximate number of users following the page on the day of data acquisition (15 Jan 2017). Although this number only partially translates into post popularity, it is an important reference point for other content being compared.
The history of a Facebook presence does not necessarily affect the aggregate number of posts published. The longest existing page (Kraków Festival Office, established May 2009) has a much smaller frequency of posts than, for example, the City of Gardens. The leader in this respect is Wrocław 2016, which posts its content more than twice daily. Such high frequency is of course related to Wrocław being the European Capital of Culture for 2016.
Wrocław is also leading the way in the most popular post category, probably due to the scale of events organised by this institution in 2016. These spectacular results correspond to the average interaction values for respective pages. However, by comparing arithmetic average and median values, it is possible to detect extreme values, i.e. the rare extremely popular posts which tend to drive up the results. This is evident in the case of Wroclaw 2016 and the City of Gardens, where the disparity between the average and median values is most substantial. This means that posts enjoying the engagement of several hundred people are very rare among all the institutions surveyed, while most of the published content produces only a few measurable user interactions.
Although the three-digit like figures are the object of desire for many an administrator, the greatest research value lies in more detailed statistics on e.g. types of published content and their potential to engage users. A glance at the percentage breakdown of selected posts reveals real differences in the communication activities of particular institutions. In contrast to the Krakow Festival Office, the City Culture Institute publishes considerably more events. A significant part of posts by the Kraków Festival Office, on the other hand, are links, while the City Culture Institute rarely posts videos, which allegedly enjoy the greatest popularity among social media users.
Although the available statistics will not tell us whether this is a conscious strategy of these institutions, the median interaction value for the different types of content allows us to observe the level of popularity they enjoy. Event posts, although shared relatively often by the Workshops of Culture, seem to generate very little interaction. On the other hand, the video content published regularly by Wrocław 2016 is definitely successful in attracting the attention of users.
The above considerations are certainly not enough to satisfy the curiosity of researchers and those responsible for the promotion of cultural events, but they can be a good starting point for further research and subsequent questions that probably should be raised with the marketing departments of each institution. Are the disproportions in the type of published content a result of differences in those institutions’ respective agendas? Are they part of a conscious strategy to engage audiences?
In carrying out this type of studies, we try to avoid drawing hasty conclusions. For example, the above analyses are based on data from several years, during which time the institutions’ communication strategies may have undergone several changes. Such exploratory studies, therefore, should perhaps be carried out for individual years and trends examined over a longer period. We will discuss this kind of visualisations in our next post.