October was a GREAT month for Facebook, particularly in terms of video content. We had five videos with more than 25 thousand minutes viewed – and one of those had 900,000 minutes viewed and counting! Engagement on Facebook was up 48.4% from the month before, and a huge chunk of that is the videos in question.
So, I’m sure your next question is: what video really drove that trend? Hands down, it was the train rescue (UHP trooper pulling man from car on tracks just seconds before Frontrunner slammed into it). We shared multiple videos from that event, including dashcam from the trooper and the train. All of those videos did fantastic for us. The original video (dashcam from the trooper) was shared more than 1,000 times.
Instagram also continues to be a huge growth area for the digital team. We picked up about 1,500 new followers in October, putting us at 21,825. We went from averaging barely 5 – 10 posts per month on the account at the beginning of the year to about 50 now. And we set an all-time high for interactions (likes and comments) from our Instagram fans in October with 46,153. In spite of having far fewer followers than KSL TV, Fox 13 or even the Deseret News, CrowdTangle shows us consistently leading the market on Instagram. This is the “leaderboard” for October for our market. (And by the way, our top video for that time frame is the same one as for Facebook – the train rescue.)
Our top website story in October is also a Facebook win. Kelli Pierce wrote a story about setting a record for low temps in the last week of the month, which Ryan Meeks shared on Facebook. That story, all by itself, got almost as much traffic as just our homepage (64K pageviews to 65K for the homepage itself). It single-handedly drove up overall traffic to our site for the month, as people who landed there from Facebook clicked around and read other stories. You can see this demonstrated in the chart below – each dot represents traffic coming to our site from Facebook. The end-of-the-month spike is almost all traffic to Kelli’s story.
Thank you to our digital team and all those who contributed to our online presence over the past month. Here are some of our highlights!
We had several videos that went nuts on our social accounts in the last 45 days, but none more so than Colby Walker’s Chick-fil-a pilots video, which is at over 4 million reached and counting!
Our Instagram page not only continues to grow, it’s actually outperforming many of our other Instagram accounts here in house. Plans moving forward include occasional “reporter takeovers” of the account to help peel back the curtain and show people what it’s like behind the scenes here.
Our Twitter account demonstrates how important we are to people in the event of a real breaking local emergency. I’ve highlighted a tweet (attached) from the Gun Range Fire at the end of August, alongside stats for the month where you can see that event “spike” on our stats. It’s clear people know where to go when stuff is happening in their neighborhood.
Website
Social accounts continue to be a key driver for us to our website, and we’ve spent some time with some key people in talk and news emphasizing how important it is for our reporters/producers/hosts to share our content from their own social accounts as well. Here again, one of our best-trafficked stories is from the fire in Bountiful, but probably second to that was the story we wrote about our own Don Brinkerhoff’s family, after his son was seriously injured when he was hit by a car. Both stories were shared heavily on social (not just from the station accounts, but from individuals both inside and outside the station). I think they also demonstrate KSL’s commitment, not just to tell a story but to make sure it makes a difference.
APP
Download numbers always get a big boost from football season, as you can see pretty easily in the attached chart. The spikes are all game days. You can also pretty easily see usage of our apps go up on game days.
