A Facebook Group at General Election Time
A collection of stats from Canterbury Residents Group during the general election 2019
Some people just love stats… and stats about elections, to some people, is like honey to a bee. If you are one of those people, I hope you find the below stats interesting. The admin of a Facebook group has a access to group insights that provide a limited amount of data about the group, but all the essential stats are there and detailed below.
The graph above shows the number of posts per day in Canterbury Residents Group, from November 1st until December 30th, showing the lead-up to the general election and the two weeks after over the Christmas period.
On December 11th, the day before the general election, just under 600 posts were made to the group, breaking the all time record for number of posts in one day since the group started in 2014. In the 2 week pre-election period, 4700 posts were made to the group, and in the 2 month pre-election period 12,900 posts were made, a 66% increase on a normal 2 month period. The percentage of these posts that were election related can be estimated to be around 85%, based on increase above usual post frequency. The graph below shows for the whole of 2019.
The number of comments in the group over the 2 week pre-election period was 58.2k, an average of 4100 comments a day. The highest number of comments was on election day itself, with just under 6000 comments throughout polling day.
The number of active users (unique individuals who have engaged with content from the group in the period defined) peaked at 22k on election day, and was 22,000 in total over the 2 month period.
The demographic make-up of CRG is as follows, and was not noticeably affected by members that joined after the election was announced.
Below is a selection of posts that received over 5,000 impressions during the pre-election period.
And finally, the CRG election interviews received over 30,000 views all together during the Facebook live broadcast and in the preceding 24 hours. All 3 interviews have now been seen over 20,000 times individually. They can be seen on YouTube here.
That’s it for now! If anyone out there loves data and wants to do something more clever than this, I can export most anonymised data as a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. Get in touch if you’d like to dig around the numbers.
