NewsWhip reposted this
How do you measure the impact of an op-ed? Yesterday, George Clooney released a call for President Biden to step down in a New York Times opinion piece, and it set the internet abuzz. The fact that the article came out of the blue allows us to do an analysis of how much influence one piece can have. The article itself had 10k engagements, but it's the echo that one piece can have across the internet that grabs the attention. The piece has sparked more than 4,000 articles, with more than 100,000 interactions across them, but the discussion and engagement sparked on social as a result of one op-ed is fascinating. It combines for more than a million engagements across social in total, and still rising. You'd expect a lot of engagement with this on X, as it's viewed as the platform for political conversations. That's borne out in the data, but the takeaway for me here is the level of influence Instagram has for news dissemination. The top posts on the platform are mostly from media organizations, and if you're not paying attention to Instagram you miss a huge chunk of how the public consumes news. BBC News, CNN, and The Washington Post all had Instagram posts with tens of thousands of engagements reporting on the New York Times piece. So how do we think about influence and impact? It's all about context. Some articles will get a lot of engagement with the article itself, while some will spark conversations that resonate beyond the page and take on lives of their own in different channels, and you have to be prepared for both, especially in an election year.
Almost 770k engagements on Instagram alone. Insta, the new mainstream media channel
Very interesting, Benedict Nicholson , Thanks for sharing! Nowadays, social media might not be the most trustworthy source of information in terms of news consumption - but in order to understand the impact of specific events - nothing compares to social. What other surprising sources do you guys cover?
Podcast data for PR and Brands | Head of Growth & Strategy @ Podchaser
1mointeresting stats via podcast mentions too (see gif below)