Hiya Kos kids. I'm one of the little orange elves working behind the scenes here at Daily Kos. As the executive assistant, my job means I help the executive and editorial team by doing whatever random noun needs verbing. It's a busy, fun job, and no two days are ever exactly the same.
A decent chunk of my time is spent manning the Daily Kos Facebook page with the help of Jen Hayden (the blogger formerly known as Scout Finch). Our Facebook page has grown a lot in the last year or so and now has over 97,000 fans. That's 97,000 peeps—most of whom probably aren't registered Daily Kos users—consuming, sharing and commenting on Daily Kos content outside of the site.
One thing that makes it so easy to share and promote superb content is the fact that we not only have an array of amazing writers on staff, but that we have a spectacular and much larger community that covers stories all day long. And you'd be surprised when you look at the numbers, because often it's community diaries that are as shared or even more shared than staff content.
So from now on, I'm going to take a little chunk out of my Mondays or Tuesdays to make pretty (my standards are low) tables to share some of our previous week's stats (thanks, Google analytics) for the Daily Kos stories that drove the most traffic from Facebook back to the site. Basically, these are the top stories that were shared on Facebook this week that resulted in readers on the Big Orange. Some of this comes from us admins sharing the stories on the Facebook page. Some of it comes from the Facebook "like" button on the Daily Kos story itself, or folks sharing stories on their own Facebook pages. Either way, here the top 25 stories for the week of Monday, May 6 through Sunday, May 12, with front-page content colored orange and community content shaded gray:
Just to clarify, those were the top 25 stories that drove traffic to Daily Kos from Facebook last week. A total of 10 out of the top 25 traffic-drivers were community content. A couple all-stars made it on there more than once (I'm talking to you, BruinKid and Leslie Salzillo).
But sometimes stories get great shares on Facebook itself, yet don't necessarily result in a ton of traffic on Daily Kos. How the eff does that work? Well, first off, it means a good portion of people on the site clicked the "like" button. And also it means the story got decent eyeballs and shares on Facebook without people actually clicking back through to read the story on the site. I know, I know. Why would you share something you didn't even click through to read? Facebook is a mysterious beast.
With that in mind, here are a few of this week's honorable mentions—stories that shared really well and ranked as "viral" via Facebook insights (were in a large amount of people's Facebook newsfeeds), but weren't the top traffic-drivers back to the site.
ProgLegs' Tea Party Legislator Suggests Man Who Lost Both Legs in Boston Bombings Wasn't Really Injured
Matt Wuerker's Building a tragedy
And DarkSyde's The price of doing bidness.
Thanks to all y'all for creating such fabulous content for us to share! Keep in mind, sharing fellow diarists' posts on Facebook and other social networks is just one more way to support the community and its members. And if you haven't yet, "like" us on Facebook and help us hit our goal of 100,000 fans. Next up? World domination, of course.