Inside LabourStart

Nine days ago I launched a major Facebook ad campaign to promote LabourStart which I am today suspending. Here are the numbers:

• 563 more people liked our Facebook page
• 1,260 clicked on the link
• 198,359 individuals saw the ad
• 138,838 people saw the ad with the names of their friends who like LabourStart
• Total cost: US$ 832.83 (£506.60)

The actual number of people who ‘like’ our FB page has grown from 1,710 to 2,330, a gain of 620 (36%) during this period.

Of these 620 individuals, 563 appear to have come from the ad campaign and another 57 through other means.

When I launched the campaign ten days ago, I showed a list of 50 unions and campaigning organizations and how many FB fans they had; we were 24th on that list. Today — without checking how others are doing — we’re probably 18th. Here’s the revised list (numbers for other groups are not updated):

Global – Avaaz 231,994
USA – Moveon.org 152,151
Global – Human Rights Watch 139,571
Global – Amnesty International 49,171
UK – 38 Degrees 31,002
USA – AFL-CIO 28,918
Australia – GetUp! 18,299
UK – False Economy 10,400
USA/Canada – SEIU 8,989
USA/Canada – USW 5,955
USA – Labor Notes 5,419
Germany – IG Metall 5,258
Germany – ver.di 3,457
USA – Young Trade Unionists 2,769
USA – IWW Starbucks Workers Union 2,624
Global – UNI Global Union 2,511
Israel – Histadrut 2,448
Global – LabourStart 2,330
UK – TUC 2,048
UK – Unite 1,897
UK – UNISON 1,892
Global – ITUC 1,860
Global – Clean Clothes Campaign 1,828
Australia – AWU 1,777
Global – LabourStart 1,710

The number of people who are fans of LabourStart’s Facebook page in English has leaped from 1,710 to 1,879 in just two days – a growth of 10%.  If this rate continues, sometime in the next day or two we will reach 2,000 fans.  This would mean leaping over five other sites in the ‘league table’ I published here on the weekend, putting LabourStart in 19th place instead of 24th.

Also over the weekend I quietly launched a LabourStart ‘badge’ which people can use on Facebook.  You can learn more here.  It looks like Derek, myself and one other person have successfully done this to our Facebook images. Should we promote this more aggressively?

Finally, the Palestine campaign is doing very well relative to other recent campaigns.  Here are the totals:

1. Georgia 3,617 (25 days online)
2. Iraq 3,411 (55 days online)
3. Botswana 3,363 (49 days online)
4. Palestine 3,138 (only 4 days online)
5. Colombia 2,819 (35 days online)
6. Korea 2,746 (12 days online)
7. Russia 1,697 (46 days online)

The most successful ads on Facebook, apparently, are the ones that promote an organization’s Facebook page – getting people to ‘like’ your page is easier than getting them to do just about anything else.  And if they ‘like’ you, they will see your posts on their own news feeds, as will their friends.

Facebook now allows for a very interesting kind of targetting – you can choose to show ads only to Facebook members who are friends with people who already ‘like’ LabourStart — in other words, people who are themselves likely to be trade unionists (or sympathetic to the trade union movement).

The ad campaign we’ll be running starting tomorrow targets 282,680 Facebook users in these 22 countries: United States, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Canada, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Israel, Finland, Denmark, Australia, Russia, Brazil, China, France and Germany.  The users are all over the age of 18 and list English as one of their languages.  None of them are currently LabourStart fans.  The ad reads:

If you’re a trade union member, you’re going to love (not ‘like’) LabourStart. Check out our Facebook page and website

At the moment, we have 1,710 people who ‘like’ our page on Facebook.  Our page is a very new one, launched on 1 April.  Over the last 114 days, we’ve grown by exactly 15 per day since then.  We should reach 2,000 ‘likes’ by 11 August (and 10,000 in 18 months), even without this ad campaign.

By way of comparison, here are some other FB pages and how many ‘like’ them:

1. Global – Avaaz 231,994
2. USA – Moveon.org 152,151
3. Global – Human Rights Watch 139,571
4. Global – Amnesty International 49,171
5. UK – 38 Degrees 31,002
6. USA – AFL-CIO 28,918
7. Australia – GetUp! 18,299
8. UK – False Economy 10,400
9. USA/Canada – SEIU 8,989
10. USA/Canada – USW 5,955
11. USA – Labor Notes 5,419
12. Germany – IG Metall 5,258
13. Germany – ver.di 3,457
14. USA – Young Trade Unionists 2,769
15. USA – IWW Starbucks Workers Union  2,624
16. Global – UNI Global Union 2,511
17. Israel – Histadrut 2,448
18. UK – TUC 2,048
19. UK – Unite 1,897
20. UK – UNISON 1,892
21. Global – ITUC 1,860
22. Global – Clean Clothes Campaign 1,828
23. Australia – AWU 1,777
24. Global – LabourStart 1,710
25. Global – International Labor Rights Forum 1,536
26. Ireland – ICTU 1,386
27. USA – Student Labor Action Project 1,318
28. Israel – Kav LaOved 1,297
29. Global – IWW – 1,202
30. Canada – CLC 709
31. UK – GMB 583
32. Palestine – PGFTU 441
33. South Africa – COSATU 434
34. Canada – CUPW 423
35. Global – International Metalworkers Federation 366
36. Global – ICEM 232
37. Israel/Palestine – WAC Ma’an 226
38. Global – Global Labour University 224
39. Palestine – DWRC 202
40. USA – ILCA 115
41. Global – Fair Labor Association 93
42. UK – Banana Link 70
43. New Zealand – NZCTU 66
44. Europe – ETUC 64
45. Australia – ACTU 63
46. Global – Education International 46
47. Global – WFTU 46
48. USA – Labour Behind the Label 35
49. Iran – IASWI 23
50. Global – Global Unions 11

• We’re around 500 people short of our goal of 10,000 supporters for this campaign – we’ll do another push this afternoon.
• A prominent Facebook ‘like’ button now appears on top of every campaign page.  Please click on it.
• Later today, I have a phone call scheduled with the AFL-CIO international department to discuss a major campaign we may need to do in defense of Georgian trade unions.
• The review (overhaul) of our website that was due to appear in .net magazine did not appear yesterday – but the editor has assured me that it will appear in next month’s issue and apologized.
• Now we have a correct link on every language page in LabourStart that allows you to sign up to our list in that specific language.
• We’ve fixed the Turkish title of our conference and added a registration page in Turkish to the site.
• I’ve completed the task of writing individual, personalized messages to every national trade union center within 1,000 km of Istanbul (that’s 20 countries).
• We now have an online page that shows who has registered for our conference – email me if you’d like to see it and I’ll send you the URL.

The ITUC has issued its annual report on the violations of trade union rights.   It’s important that we do all we can to promote this — in all our languages and in all countries.  Here are some of the things I’m doing today:

• Promoting this in a LabourStart mass mailing later today
• Posted it to the LabourStart page on Facebook
• Posted it as a tweet – as LabourStart
• Posted it on UnionBook – and then automatically through my personal account to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Other correspondents have already made sure it’s a top news story on LabourStart today.

What have you done?

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:
—
Mailing lists (with over 100 members)
English: 56.584 [56,950]
Norwegian: 2,759 [2,760]
French: 2,481 [2,462]
Spanish: 1,532 [1,614]
German: 839 [854]
Turkish: 689
Italian: 526
Russian: 493
Polish: 302
Portuguese: 252
Chinese: 243
Dutch: 234
Finnish: 178

—
Social networks
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,593 [3,503]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,369 [4,332]
Like LabourStart.org page 962 [120]
Twitter – followers: 3,469 [3,269]
Union group on Flickr: 637 [635]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 334 [318]
—
Website
Correspondents: 866 [865]
Unique visits to the site this month: 532,236 [509,194]
Page views this month: 1,245,761 [1,291,153]
Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):
* English 49,471 [45,959]
Our web host (1&1 Internet) no longer provides details beyond the 30 most popular pages, and none of the other language pages are in this category.

LabourStart only recently launched a Facebook Page –

http://www.facebook.com/labourstart.org

The page went live 18 days ago.

This comes after having had a Facebook Group for several years.

Pages have certain advantages – and they seem to go viral faster because updates appear on your own news feeds.

We were admittedly quite late to discover this and I’ve decided have a look around and see how many fans the various union Facebook pages currently have and when they were last updated.

Here’s a selection from the global unions (including the date last updated) — these are the ones with active Facebook pages:

1. UNI Global Union – 2,298 – 17 April
2. PSI – 1,903 – 18 April
3. International Trade Union Confederation – 1,640 – 16 April
4. LabourStart – 787 – 16 April
5. IUF – 662 – 16 April
6. IMF – 306 – 15 April

And these are the inactive ones:

1. ICEM – 209 – 4 March
2. IFJ – 90 – never updated
3. BWI – 27 – 12 April
4. Education International – 30 – 14 April
5. ITGLWF – no page
6. ITF – no page

As for national trade union centers in the English-speaking world, here’s a selection:

1. USA: AFL-CIO 25,182
2. UK: TUC 1,821
3. USA: Change to Win 1,412
4. Ireland: Irish Congress of Trade Unions 1,333
5. Canada: CLC 491
6. South Africa: COSATU 84
7. Australia: ACTU 32
8. New Zealand: CTU 31 [see comments below for more details]