Inside LabourStart

At the request of the UE (the independent union in the USA) and the Solidarity Center, we’ve just launched this campaign in English and Spanish simultaneously.

Nearly 3 months ago, I wrote here about LabourStart’s score on Klout, which measures our influence in social media. At the time, it was 56; this has fallen to 47. The average score is 20, so we remain relatively high. To increase our Klout score, we need more people to follow us on Twitter, to re-tweet our messages, and so on. I intend to follow up with this in the days and weeks to come and will keep you informed.

Headline news –
1 The Italian mailing list grew five-fold from 560 to 2,420, becoming our third largest list overnight – due to the FIAT campaign.
2 The Russian list also grew by some 15% in one month due to our Kazakhstan campaign.
3 For the first time ever, UnionBook has more members than our group on Facebook – which has declined in membership for the first time.
4 Our followers on Twitter outnumber both of these, and the number has now exceeded 5,000 for the first time.
5 Our relatively inactive group on LinkedIn continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month.
6 At the current rate of growth (5 new correspondents per month), we won’t reach 1,000 correspondents before the end of 2012 – so we’ll want to do a cull to remove inactive correspondents sooner than that.
7 Traffic to the site remained quite high considering that it was December. There were just under 600,000 unique visitors. And this in spite of the fact that the last third of the month would have seen many (or most) of our readers on vacation.

Here are the totals with the last month (December 2011) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,576 [66,226]
French: 3,582 [3,333]
Italian: 2,420 [560]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,337]
Spanish: 2,115 [2,082]
German: 1,516 [1,485]
Turkish: 778 [758]
Russian: 712 [617]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 236 [235]
Finnish: 183 [182]
Swedish: 182 [182]
Japanese: 137 [133]
Danish: 107 [112]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [97]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]
Arabic 89 [84]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,790 [4,706]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,714 [4,738]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,462 [3,192]
Like LabourStart page (French): 96 [89]

Twitter –
English – followers: 5,180 [4,964]
French – followers: 85 [82]

Union group on Flickr: 673 [661]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 551 [503]

Website

Correspondents: 940 [935]

Unique visits to the site this month : 597,481 [576,905]
Peak day: 23,597 – 17.12.11
Page views this month: 1,370,129 [1,371,687]