18 consecutive months of social media dominance

18 consecutive months of social media dominance

For a year and a half now, third-party data shows we’ve consistently dominated our competitors on social media.

Our organic, content-first strategies that emphasize local, prideful, emotional and good-looking content have held us consistently in the top spot according to ShareRocket’s market rankings.

Furthermore, we’ve held at least 30 percent of the market share for ten of the past 12 months.

ShareRocket quantifies our market as a universe of the collective reach and engagement across properties operated by seven local television news operations. ShareRocket used to post blogs summarizing their data on a quarterly basis, but I am basing my claim on reports obtained from their dashboard as it seems the company hasn’t published a market summary blog since April.

We’ve now held this lead in ShareRocket’s data for over one-half of my tenure at WCVB, and if things were on a level playing field it would likely have been longer. One of our competitors was spending a great deal of money to buy fans and boost their Facebook posts during at least the first year I was working here in Boston. ShareRocket’s data was incapable of distinguishing between organic and paid reach.

WCVB’s ShareRocket share over the past 18 months:

  1. June 2017: 27.22%
  2. July 2017: 28.76%
  3. August 2017: 30.47%
  4. September 2017: 29.74%
  5. October 2017: 29.49%
  6. November 2017: 30.77%
  7. December 2017: 28.62%
  8. January 2018: 33.11%
  9. February 2018: 32.46%
  10. March 2018: 31.62%
  11. April 2018: 34.48%
  12. May 2018: 31.11%
  13. June 2018: 33.36%
  14. July 2018: 29.47%
  15. August 2018: 32.76%
  16. September 2018: 30.04%
  17. October 2018: 30.31%
  18. November 2018: 31.33%

*Source: ShareRocket monthly market reports for “Boston Television” segment.

As ShareRocket noted in their summary blog from the first quarter of 2018, the vast majority of WCVB’s lead comes from our enormously successful main Facebook page. This means we can verify and support the conclusion with data from the Facebook-owned CrowdTangle service.

When measuring the primary brand pages of the same seven local news brands over the same 18 months, the chart is clear — there is only one month in which the dominance of our primary page was challenged.

Source: CrowdTangle Intelligence