Inside LabourStart

If you manage one of the LabourStart Twitter feeds could you update me (Derek Blackadder) on what you’re doing? I’m about to do another quick survey of the people following the feeds I run to see what they think about tweet frequency, hours, etc and it would be useful to know what you’re doing I think.

FYI, here’s what I currently have set up:

Management software: Hootsuite

Global English feed: one tweet every 3 hours, 24/7. Plus campaign tweets, the auto feed of Top Stories as they are posted and the odd tweet from Eric et al at the office.

English Canadian feed: one per hour, 12 per day, 7 days per week from 0700 to 1900 Eastern.

French Canadian feed: one every two hours, 6 per day, 7 days per week from 0700 to 1900 Eastern.

I also have some boilerplate tweets (re. the Flickr group, newswires, donations, that sort of thing) which I throw into the mix as the mood takes me.

Thanks.

Derek

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below.

Some highlights:

• Very big gains for our mailing lists — now well over 120,000 (121,362).  Over 30% of all subscribers are to the non-English lists — 36,555.
• As I reported earlier, the ten-fold growth of the Korean list is a spectacular result of our most recent campaign — plus an effort by the teachers’ union there as well.
• On Facebook, our Group continues to grow considerably faster than our Page.  And both are being outpaced by our growth on Twitter — now at 11,255 for the global English feed.
• Our statistics for web traffic show huge growth from Germany, Russia and Korea — no doubt due to our most recent campaigns.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 121,362 [117,869] +3,493

English: 84,807 [83,669]
French: 7,111 [6,813]
Spanish: 5,134 [5,138]
Italian: 3,992 [4,002]
German: 3,887 [3,870]
Turkish: 3,272 [3,272]
Norwegian: 2,902 [2,911]
Russian: 2,464 [2,091]
Korean: 1,786 [178]
Dutch: 1,405 [1,414]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,073]
Finnish: 581 [584]
Japanese: 391 [334]
Arabic: 321 [321]
Polish: 280 [281]
Portuguese: 273 [263]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 243 [246]
Farsi: 242 [241]
Indonesian: 223 [199]
Swedish: 192 [192]
Danish: 127 [134]
Czech: 87 [86]
Esperanto: 86 [75]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 59 [59]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 20 [19]
Bulgarian: 18 [18]
Creole: 12 [12]
Vietnamese:12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 11,255 [10,774]
Canada English: 2,619 [2,521]
Canada French: 342 [318]
French: 199 [194]
USA: 102 [78]
Spanish: 65 [63]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
German: 16 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,268 [8,167]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,463 [6,281]
Like LabourStart page (French): 364 [350]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 130 [129]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 104 [103]

UnionBook
Members: 5,682 [5,657]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,492 [1,465]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 741 [740]

Website

Correspondents: 684 [678]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 647,661 [629,107]
Peak day: 27,297 [26,535]
Page impressions: 1,548,778 [1,556,129]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 42,201 [51,338]
Peak day: 4,652 [5,127]
Where they come from:
USA – 9,947 [9,902]
Canada – 6,955 [7,865]
UK – 5,553 [6,885]
Australia – 2,656 [2,785]
Germany – 1,482 [944]
Norway – 1,395 [1,748]
Indonesia – 1,325 [8,133]
South Korea – 938 [–]
France – 840 [788]
Sweden – 799 [913]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 50,997 [28,299]
Peak day: 5,651 [5,181]
Where they come from:
USA – 8,571 [4,997]
South Korea – 7,267
UK – 6,295 [5,841]
Canada – 5,494 [4,076]
Russia – 2,308
Australia – 2,305 [1,798]
France – 2,127 [966]
Germany – 1,797 [742]
Spain – 1,633 [1,101]
Belgium – 1,110 [925]

Campaigns:

• The Korea campaign, closing today, was one of the largest we ever ran. In the last 13 days, it grew from 11,295, which was already pretty good, to 14,566 — a gain of 3,271 during the Christmas period.
• Our Kazakhstan campaign continues to grow, albeit slower — we’re now up to 10,731, a gain of over 730 in the last two weeks.
• We’ll be a launching a new campaign in support of United Steelworkers Canada after the new year. The earlier version was closed five days ago.
• We closed two other campaigns (Honduras and UN staff) a week ago.

Berlin 2014: We’re up to 241 registrants, 50 from Germany, 36 from the UK, and the remaining 155 from 51 other countries. In another 11 days, Tom and I head over to Berlin to meet the organizing committee there. I’ve done a mailing to all registrants and we now have the option to de-register people who cannot attend. As I’ve explained before, many of the registrants have asked about subsidies even though we’ve repeatedly explained that everyone must pay their own way.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow and grow. We’re ending the year with 97,100 addresses on our top three lists: English – 84,853; French – 7,112; Spanish – 5,135. A year ago, those three lists totalled 85,501— a net gain of 11,599, or nearly 14%.

Social networks:

• We picked up another 5 new Twitter followers in the last 5 days, bringing our total to 11,243. It was 8,115 a year ago — a growth of 3,128, or almost 39%. This is much higher than the growth of our mailing lists.
• We have considerably fewer supporters on Facebook, with only 8,267. A year ago that number was 5,877, so we’ve picked up 2,390 new fans on Facebook — a gain of over 40%.

Book and calendar sales:

• Calendar sales reached 221 by year’s end — disappointing, but not a disaster.  (We didn’t lose any money, and earned £172.)
• Sales of our latest book, Firefox OS for Activists, continue to slowly grow.  We sold 97 paperbacks and 115 Kindle editions, for a total of 212.
• I’ll report on sales of our other titles in the new year.

I’ve just closed down our longest and most expensive ad campaign on Twitter, which has been running since 17 November.  Our ads have been seen by over 146,000 people, have increased our number of followers by 577, and cost us a total of £318.  As a result of this campaign, we’re now up to 11,238 followers.  By comparison, here are how some of our partners fare:

1. Amnesty International 876,466
2. SEIU (USA & Canada) 44,719
3. AFL-CIO (USA) 43,748
4. Unite the Union (UK) 24,393
5. COSATU (South Africa) 22,902
6. UNISON (UK) 21,483
7. Teamsters (USA & Canada) 14,326
8. LabourStart 11,238
9. Labor Notes (USA) 10,212
10. International Labor Rights Forum (USA) 6,895
11. CUPE National (Canada) 6,134
12. CAW Communications (Canada) 5,150
13. ITUC 4,539
14. UNI Global Union 4,484
15. TUC Global (UK) 4,427
16. AWU (Australia) 3,741
17. Union Solidarity International 3,413
18. AMWU (Australia) 3,042
19. Education International 2,792
20. IFJ 2,576
21. IndustriALL 2,459
22. ITF 2,242
23. IUF 1,098
24. TUAC 957
25. Industri Energi (Norway) 950

Our mailing lists grew slightly smaller as despite running new campaigns, we were running them to the same audiences, not picking up new ones. (We’re down over 600 subscribers this month.) It’s vitally important that unions which partner with us when doing a campaign understand this — otherwise our list will continue to fall little by little every month.

And though our numbers on social networks are steadily rising, there was a falling off of traffic to our websites.

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 117,869 [118,504]

English: 83,669 [84,236]
French: 6,813 [6,828]
Spanish: 5,138 [5,140]
Italian: 4,002 [4,026]
German: 3,870 [3,886]
Turkish: 3,272 [3,274]
Norwegian: 2,911 [2,927]
Russian: 2,091 [2,089]
Dutch: 1,414 [1,426]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,078]
Finnish: 584 [570]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 321 [322]
Polish: 281 [282]
Portuguese: 263 [256]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [247]
Farsi: 241 [245]
Indonesian: 199 [182]
Swedish: 192 [195]
Korean 178 [177]
Danish: 134 [137]
Czech: 86 [88]
Esperanto: 75 [74]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 59 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 18 [19]
Creole: 12 [13]
Vietnamese:12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 10,774 [10,478]
Canada English: 2,521 [2,430]
Canada French: 318 [304]
French: 194 [189]
USA: 78 [57]
Spanish: 63 [62]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
German: 15 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,167 [7,998]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,281 [6,106]
Like LabourStart page (French): 350 [343]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 129 [129]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 103 [99]

UnionBook
Members: 5,657 [5,635]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,465 [1,429]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 740 [738]

Website

Correspondents: 678 [673]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 629,107 [669,594]
Peak day: 26,535 [27,154]
Page impressions: 1,556,129 [1,707,274]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,338 [63,424]
Peak day: 5,127 [4,966]
Where they come from:
USA – 9,902 [11,091]
Indonesia – 8,133 [12,967]
Canada –  7,865 [10,208]
UK – 6,885 [8,086]
Australia – 2,785 [3,179]
Norway – 1,748 [1,897]
Germany – 944 [932]
Sweden – 913 [966]
France – 788 [807]
Netherlands – 679 [—]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 28,299 [41,088]
Peak day: 5,181 [6,044]
Where they come from:
UK – 5,841 [5,809]
USA – 4,997 [5,821]
Canada – 4,076 [6,692]
Australia – 1,798 [1,882]
Spain – 1,101 [1,787]
France – 966 [1,216]
Belgium – 925 [1,649]
Norway – 778 [1,017]
Germany – 742 [1,669]
Netherlands 626 —

Campaigns: Three new campaigns were launched in the last week, plus we did publicity for the IUF campaign on Colombia and IndustriALL’s campaign on Iraq.  I really appreciate the incredible work done by our volunteer translators in getting these translations done.

Berlin 2014: Our conference blog is being updated, some 40 people have already registered, and we’re doing loads of publicity. On Friday, I was invited to address a meeting of global union communicators at the ITF headquarters in London about the conference.  There were participants from the ITUC, ITF, IndustriALL, PSI, etc.  I migrated the entire database of conference participants to a relational database using MySQL, which has made it much easier to display (and sort) the list of people who’ve registered.  I wrote to 10 comrades in Turkey specifically appealing for help building a Turkish contingent; no one has replied yet.  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today – click here.

Mailings to national lists: We just did a mailing to our UK list advertising a half dozen events taking place in the next month and plan to do this regularly; we encouraged people to submit their events to our online events list — and we’ll take future ones from there.  We also did a Canada-only mailing today promoting a Bangladesh garment workers’ meeting in Toronto.

Writings: I had an article in Solidarity about the successful railway workers’ strike in Georgia and have been commissioned to write something on the same subject for Equal Times.  I have also been commissioned to write about the Histadrut’s recent organizing successes for Jungle World, in Germany.

Book & calendar sales: Still sluggish.  We’ve now sold 190 calendars; our third book (Firefox OS) is up to over 160.  An attempt to promote sales of the book on the Iraqi labour movement, “Hadi Never Died”, disappointed with only two sales. Tom is preparing a calendar of trade union events in the UK at which we can sell our publications in 2014, following on the success Derek had at the CUPE convention in Canada.  Comrades — you can help by posting reviews of our books on Amazon and spreading the word about all LabourStart publications.

Social networks: Our group on Facebook is growing quite quickly, though we’re doing nothing to promote it.  66 people joined in the last week alone.  On Twitter, we’ve launched a low-key, low-cost ad campaign which has brought us 12 new followers in the last 2 days (at a cost of £2.00).

Gains are reported in green and losses in red.  Previous month’s numbers in brackets.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 118,464 [116,485]

English: 84,236 [83,741]
French: 6,828 [6,717]
Spanish: 5,140 [4,994]
Italian: 4,026 [4,004]
German: 3,886 [3,323]
Turkish: 3,274 [3,281]
Norwegian: 2,927 [2,472]
Russian: 2,089 [2,093]
Dutch: 1,426 [1,376]
Chinese: 1,078 [1,010]
Finnish: 570 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 322 [315]
Polish: 282 [282]
Portuguese: 256 [247]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 247 [225]
Farsi: 245 [213]
Swedish: 195 [193]
Indonesian: 182 [163]
Korean 177 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Esperanto: 74 [61]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,478 [10,266]
Canada English: 2,430 [2,289]
Canada French: 304 [234]
French: 189 [187]
Spanish: 62 [59]
USA: 57 [31]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [15]
German: 15 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,998 [7,925]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,106 [5,936]
Like LabourStart page (French): 343 [340]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 129 [127]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [99]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,635 [5,627]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,429 [1,403]

Union group on Flickr: 738 [734]

Website

Correspondents: 673 [663]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 669,594 [623,875]
Peak day: 27,154 [34,420]
Page impressions: 1,707,274 [1,845,122]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 63,424 [51,799]
Peak day: 4,966 [7,798]
Where they come from:
*** Indonesia – 12,967 [4,665] ***
USA – 11,091 [9,789]
Canada – 10,208 [9,138]
UK – 8,086 [8,469]
Australia – 3,179 [3,048]
Norway – 1,897 [1,733]
Sweden – 966 [935]
Germany – 932 [867]
Belgium – 842
France – 807

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 41,088 [42,534]
Peak day: 6,044 [11,817]
Where they come from:
Canada – 6,692 [9,197]
USA – 5,821 [6,482]
UK – 5,809 [7,119]
Australia – 1,882 [2,561]
Spain – 1,787 [1,456]
Germany – 1,669 [1,115]
Belgium – 1,649 [1,074]
Italy – 1,335
France – 1,216 [1,091]
Norway – 1,017

Following up on popular requests (well, Derek), I’ve added some website stats this month.

These should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, a bucket-load of salt.

We are increasingly using Clicky to measure our web traffic and that’s the only system we use on the campaign pages.

The Clicky code has not been placed on every single page on LabourStart.org (the news site), but it should also give a good indication of the number of actual visitors to the live section of the website.

So, why is 1&1 giving a much larger number?

Hard to tell — some of that is, strangely enough, “internal traffic” from 1&1’s own servers, a lot of it will be robots and spammers.

Over time, we’ll put the Clicky code on even more pages on our site to try to make sure that we’re not missing anything, but we’re certainly not missing traffic to our home pages in the various languages.  (Except French, which only moved over to the new system in mid-month, and is therefore missing Clicky stats for the first part of the month.)

Starting next month, we’ll be able to compare, to note any increases if they happen.

Already, interesting to note fairly high traffic from countries which don’t play a big role in our campaigns, but seem to come visit our news pages — Indonesia and India in particular.  I can’t really explain the surge in interest from South Korea to our campaigns pages — it didn’t translate into people signing up to campaigns in Korean, though perhaps they were directed to a different language by a link somewhere.  (75 people from South Korea did sign the English language message to Ban Ki-moon.)

The most important day, all three sets of statistics agree on this, was Monday, 23 September — the day we launched our campaign targetting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.  Somewhere between 12,000 and 34,000 trade unionists visited LabourStart on that day.

New! Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 623,875
Peak day: 34,420 on 23.9
Page impressions: 1,845,122

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,799
Peak day: 7,798 on 23.9
Where they come from:
USA – 9,789
Canada – 9,138
UK – 8,469
Indonesia – 4,665
Australia – 3,048
Norway – 1,733
New Zealand – 1,226
India – 1,021
Sweden – 935
Germany – 867

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 42,534
Peak day: 11,817 on 23.9
Where they come from:
Canada – 9,197
UK – 7,119
USA – 6,482
Australia – 2,561
Spain – 1,456
New Zealand – 1,363
Germany – 1,115
South Korea – 1,102
France – 1,091
Belgium – 1,074

Mailing lists

New! Total for all lists: 116,485

[This was 103,324 8 months ago – a net gain of 13,161 new subscribers, or 1,645 per month]

English: 83,741 [81,907]
French: 6,717 [6,443]
Spanish: 4,994 [4,905]
Italian: 4,004 [4,017]
German: 3,323 [3,312]
Turkish: 3,281 [3,283]
Norwegian: 2,472 [2,433]
Russian: 2,093 [2,051]
Dutch: 1,376 [1,377]
Chinese: 1,010 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 315 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Portuguese: 247 [248]
Hebrew: 225 [215]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Swedish: 193 [195]
Indonesian: 163 [153]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 61 [55]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,266 [10,033]
Canada English: 2,289 [2167]
Canada French: 234 [219]
French: 187
Spanish: 59
USA: 31 New!
Japanese: 23
German: 15
Russian: 15
Portuguese: 7

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English):7,925 [7,832]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,936 [5,689]
Like LabourStart page (French): 340 [329]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 127 [126]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [97]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,627 [5,610]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,403 [1,383]

Union group on Flickr: 734 [732]

Website

Correspondents: 663 [670]

August is traditionally a quiet time and I was away for most of the month. Nevertheless, we’ve made progress on a number of fronts.

Campaigns: We’ve won a great victory at the Toronto Plaza hotel and were praised by the United Steelworkers for the work we did. Another of our previously Canada-only campaigns has gone live — we’re supporting the union demand to released jailed Canadian film-maker and union activist John Greyson, who is being held in Egypt.

Berlin 2014: We’ve announced the date and are slowly informing people about it. We’re not rushing this out just yet as some people will be wanting to get invitation letters to apply for visas to Germany and we’re not yet ready for (we’ll want a partner union there first). The committee in Berlin has already met a couple of times. I’m planning a first visit to Berlin in late October. I with spoke with ITUC staffers who are in charge of their congress and ours will follow immediately after theirs. It looks like we already have a venue for our event, which is great as still have about 8 months to go. One of the members of our Berlin committee is visiting London and we’ll meet on Saturday.

Twitter: We reached a milestone of 10,000 followers on 26 August. Twitter cards now working (see the explanation below).

Books: We have a new publications page advertising all our books and sales are probably just over 1,500 in the first 8 months. We’re working to finish the third book in the next few days, and are discussing one more for later this year and some options for next year. CreateSpace is still not being great about payments, but we hope to have this sorted out very soon.

Calendar: The LabourStart Calendar for 2014 is now done — we’ve ordered one copy to have a look at it before we go public with it. It’s a beautiful design and kudos to Edd for all the work he put into it.

Photo of the day: There’s a brand-new feature — we’ll now be able to pre-load photos for future dates, and to archive the ones we’ve run.  Derek is currently testing.

Internationalization: The Italian and Portuguese editions have been revived. We expect to spend quite a bit of time on building up the Portuguese edition and have secured some pledges of funding for this. The translators’ mailing list is now considerably larger with all languages covered and our campaigns are now routinely appearing in a large number of languages, with mailing lists growing as well.

News database: When correspondents login now, they can see their default country and language and the next step is to allow them to change these whenever they want. So if you regularly post news about, say, Canada, but suddenly have a lot of news stories from the USA, you will be able to change your default country on a temporary basis.

Travel: The next two months will see me travelling to speak at a number of trade union events. These includes separate trips to Geneva, Brussels, Cardiff, Berlin, and Kiev.

Some highlights this month (keeping in mind that August is normally a very quiet month):

• We have finally reached 10,000 followers on Twitter – our global, English feed.
• More people are joining our group on Facebook (58) than liking our page (39).

Mailing lists

English: 81,907 [81,875]
French: 6,443 [6,413]
Spanish: 4,905 [4,886]
Italian: 4,017 [4,021]
German: 3,312 [3,295]
Turkish: 3,283 [3,284]
Norwegian: 2.433 [2,441]
Russian: 2,051 [2,049]
Dutch: 1,377 [1,359]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [575]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 313 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [253]
Portuguese: 248 [245]
Hebrew: 215 [217]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [195]
Korean 154 [154]
Indonesian: 153 [152]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60
Esperanto: 55 [52]
Hindi: 40 [39]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19
Creole: 13
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 10,033 [9,936]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,832 [7,793]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,689 [5,631]
Like LabourStart page (French): 329 [324]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 126 [124]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 97 [94]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,610 [5,594]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,383 [1,376]

Union group on Flickr: 732 [729]

Website

Correspondents: 670 [665]