Glasgow the friendly city? A Social Media analysis of engagement around Scotland

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Glasgow is often touted as Scotland’s friendliest city, Digital PR expert proves it may not be the case

SOCIAL_MEDIA13WHEN I reminisce and think of my home city of Glasgow, it brings great joy. I take pride in silly things like how we say certain things, how we approach life as a city and the labels we’ve got, whether good or bad.

However, on conducting some social media analysis, I was shocked to discover that the label we had of “Friendliest City” may not actually be all that accurate.

Where’s the proof?

Facebook is a wealth of data and if you know how to tap into it, it can help you understand the audiences using it and as a business, it can influence how you look to engage with people.

Every day I look to engage with different people for a number of clients – all with different goals, so it’s vital that I understand how audiences engage with content and how likely they are to engage socially.

I pulled out some of the data that Facebook allows me access to and broke down the levels of engagement typical from Scots around the country.  For the sake of measuring it, I’ll look at levels of engagement such as number of comments on posts, likes on posts and shares of friends posts as general friendliness, with the more proactively involved cities considered the most affable.

Scotland as a whole

We’ll start with some good news for Scots, with the country as a whole considerably friendlier than Facebook users around the world. With the average user on Facebook sharing 2 posts, liking 12 and commenting on 8 in a 30 day period – Scotland outstrips that by quite a margin.

Graph showing Social Media engagement in Scotland put together by Digital PR

 

What about the cities?

So let’s break it down to the cities, below is a table which details Scotland’s cities and some towns and measures how “friendly” they are over a 30 day period.Digital PR compiled table showing engagement in Scotland

A league table is all well and good, but in order to actually understand it – you have to break it down into each City and look at it – it’s not particularly difficult to draw conclusions from it.

Top Five Cities

Leading the pack are Lerwick, Falkirk, Stromness, Dundee and Stirling. As smaller towns and cities, it’s easy to see why people would perhaps be engaging a little more. Falkirk engages particularly well, however Lerwick and Stromness being some of the most remote places and having high levels of engagement show that despite being out of the way – they take the time to be friendly on Facebook.

Bottom Five Cities

Dropping to the bottom of the pack are Aberdeen, Stornoway, Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Glasgow being at the bottom of the pack is a hard one for me to explain – but to put a positive spin on it, perhaps due to the size and nature of the city, with lots of small pockets and areas – it could be one of the last bastions of people speaking to one another in person rather than online.

I don’t think that is definitely the case though, it could simply be that Glaswegians are hard to impress and quite frankly they’d rather watch what is said on Facebook than commit to saying they ‘like’ it or to comment on it.

So how is this useful for my business?

Aside from the fact you can gauge the likelihood of users in these cities engaging with your brands page – or indeed how hard it could be to engage with people in certain cities – you can also measure other points such as susceptibility to advertisements and how many pages on average a user likes in different locations.

From this we can then tailor a package of content management and social media advertising to best suit your business – indeed it beats spending lots more time and money in trying to reach people in a way they don’t want to be reached.

Falkirk, Dundee and Lerwick all lead the pack in likelihood to click adverts on Facebook – so the chances are it could increase your cost to advertise and reach people or it could lower it – the only way to ensure you get the best deal though is to understand the audience.

This seems like a lot of hard work, is there a TL;DR?

It’s true that you can get bogged down in social media analysis for days, weeks even months, trying to tailor your message and tinker with the settings to make sure your business can benefit from the digital world we live in today. However, here at Holyrood PR they’ve got me and I do that for our clients to save them time and to break it down in a way that can be understood quickly.

 If your business is interested in using social media effectively – get in touch today and I’ll see what we can do for you.

Get in touch on 0131561 2244 or using the form below:

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