STAT, the medicine, health, life science and biotech publication, has grown to be quite popular since its start in 2015. In the journalism community, it has become a household name. Nowadays, no publication can reach that level of fame without social media. To see how STAT engages its audience, I analyzed their social media approaches across several platforms. STAT is definitely most dedicated to Facebook and Twitter, and those are the places STAT engages readers most. But STAT has tried/is trying other platforms, like Tumblr and Instagram. Here are the results of my social media audit and what’s working (and what’s not) for STAT:
Primary Account: @statnews
Number of followers as of March 6, 2018: 73.4 thousand
Historical: 305 tweets for September 2017; 750 tweets for October 2017; 619 for November 2017; 612 tweets for December 2017; 651 tweets for January 2018; 292 tweets as of Feb. 17, 2018
Average number tweets per day from Feb. 11-17, 2018: 66
Would you describe their Twitter presence as highly conversational? Are they talking to readers? Retweeting a lot? I would not classify it as conversational. They appear to almost exclusively post articles from STAT.
Describe their use of photos, video, or audio. It appears that they only post STAT articles. Each post has a photo, the cover photo for the corresponding article.
Do they appear to have a daily posting schedule, and does it look like they take peak timing into account? STAT does appear to take timing into account as it posts the most tweets between 3-5 p.m. EST.
What is their reach? They have 73.4 thousand followers and according to tweetreach.com, reached 335,730 accounts March 7, 2018 as of 6 p.m. EST.
Link to primary profile: https://www.facebook.com/statnews/
Number of friends/fans: 289,833 likes; 294,260 followers
Average number of posts per week over past month: STAT published 22 posts for the month of February in 2018.
Most shared post over the past month: The most shared post from February was an opinion piece, “It’s time to lift restrictions on studying gun violence and its prevention,” with 148 shares.
Most shared post over the past year: Their most shared post over the past year shared the article: “House GOP would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results.” It earned 79.8 thousand shares.
Is the organization actually conversing with people in the comments on posts? The organization is not conversing with people in the comments. The comments section seems to be a place reserved for readers to discuss.
Describe the use of video, photos, and audio. The only post involving audio that I came across was a post announcing the new podcast from STAT, The Readout LOUD. The only recent video posts were animated short videos advertising STAT’s “March Madness” where users can vote bracket-style for the best biomedical research out of various institutions. It seems that they post videos related to stories around once every week, not very often compared to posts sharing articles.
Are they using Facebook Groups for communities around a particular topic or story? They are not using Facebook Groups for communities around a particular topic or story.
Have you seen them using Facebook Live (hint, look at the Videos link in the right hand menu on desktop). They have not been using Facebook Live.
What else do they have in the right hand menu? They also have a link to a closed community page, their Instagram, newsletters and events.
Number of followers: 1,706
Average posts per week: They have 4 total posts for the month of February, one of which is a video. They posted three times between Feb. 5-8 2018 and once on Feb. 20. There was a similar pattern for January, with few posts concentrated within a few days.
Describe the level of engagement around their posts — likes, comments, etc. There is little engagement via comments, and usually less than fifty likes per post. This is very low engagement, especially considering that they have 1,706 followers.
Are they using Instagram Stories? If so, how? They are not.
How about Instagram Video? They do have a few video posts, averaging about 1 per month since October.
Other social
Do they have a Snapchat account? What’s on it? They do not have a Snapchat.
Do they have one or more Tumblrs? What are they about? Are they currently in use? Their Tumblr account has not been used since March of 2017. Aside from two posts in March of 2017, the last post was in January of 2016. STAT does not appear to have taken to the medium and it did not use the platform to its fullest extent, sharing visually compelling GIFs and photos. All the posts except for the last two were exclusively text.
YouTube? What are they using it for? Does it have a following? STAT has a YouTube channel with 124 videos and 2,942 subscribers. Their videos align with the video sections on their website: Explainers, Boddities, Science Happens! and then some miscellaneous uploads. These uncategorized videos seem to fall into the genre of social video or mini-doc.
What are their web mentions like? (See Brand24). STAT has had 6,287 web mentions over the past 30 days, most (5,795) stemming from Twitter. The most recent web mentions reference findings or quotes from STAT’s articles.
Have you noticed any apparently abandoned social accounts? Can you tell why they are no longer updated? Tumblr has been abandoned. It seems as though STAT never dedicated itself to using the platform as a visually-oriented blog and realized that sharing text posts linking to their articles was not the best use of the platform.
Tweet: How has @STAT become famous? I did a social media audit to see if I could find the answer there: <link to my post> #socialmedia #statmadness2018