Is he our new guru?

The meeting was, in my opinion, very interesting since the guy knew very well what he was talking about and gave straight answers to the questions we brought up – even if he was perhaps a tad less unambiguous on privacy issues. But I won’t blame him, he was representing his company, was up front about that and we shouldn’t forget it. He gave useful insights on how Facebook is going to develop, what other institutions do and what we, the European Parliament, could do to improve our Facebook-presence.

I picked up some facts and statistics to give an overview of where we stand in the Facebook-galaxy (some of them come from our boss, Steve).

I was sitting next to Fred, our graphist, during the meeting... This is the way he takes notes. Well, my notes are so boring compared to that...

We can be proud of what we do on social media, for sure:

• As far as we can tell, the European Parliament is Europe’s highest ranking public political institution on Facebook
• The European Parliament page brings together the largest online community interested in EU politics – the second one being an unofficial EU page with about 43 000 fans.
• In the world rankings of public political institutions on Facebook, the European Parliament seems to be second only to the White House
• The European Parliament is the indisputable world leader in the use of Facebook by a parliamentary institution

But, nevertheless, we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much and forget going on… because our 75 000 fans are nothing compared too:

• 272 000 on the Democracy UK page, which was launched to debate political issues at a national level.
• 455 000 fans/friends of all MEPs on Facebook (It’s even probably more than 500 000 now)
• 9.3 millions fans for Obama
• 9.6 millions fans for Lady Gaga
• 400 million Facebook users worldwide
• 500 million EU citizens
• 500 billion minutes spent on Facebook every month in the world

Our production on this blog - from July 2008

As communication geeks (and freaks), we always look at the stats. How many people did read this article? What was the traffic on the hearings website?

But we don’t look at ourselves that much… What about changing the point of view and take us, member of the web communication unit of the European Parliament, as target? Let our readers rest for a while, let them in peace. And let’s make a little assessment of our own production on this blog.

First statement: 201 posts have been posted on this blog since July 2008. A quite great amount if we look at the fact that it really started in February 2009, in the run up to the European elections. Since then, 176 posts have been posted, which makes about one every two days. The record is for October last year with 41 posts – which makes twice posts a working day!

EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?)

Second statement: Guess what? The most used category is called “At work“, with more than 35 % of the posts. Not a big surprise since this blog is run by a team of professionals… The second category is “Thinking allowed“, which shows that EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?). Personal posts aren’t that popular, but for that, we have our personal blogs, don’t we?

Third statement: Who’s writing on this blog? It’s very unequal. On average, every editor wrote 5 posts. But if we take out the three most prolific writers (who account for more than half of the posts, with a special mention for the first one who wrote… 53 posts), the average falls to 2.4 posts per person… Some people didn’t write anything, some others only every six months. C’mon guys, our readers would like to know a little bit more about you! (By the way, I’m not very prolific either…)

It’s quite difficult to analyse these figures… There are very different opinions in the team about this blog, perhaps also different views of how it should look like and why it is important in our communication strategy. And, as in every team and for every project, there are some frontrunners and some stragglers. But maybe we could write a post asking colleagues about how they consider this blog?