A social media challenge for the Conservatives

There is a very good piece on Conservative Home by Tyler Thomas, who is a student at Durham University. The article addresses the challenge which the Conservatives face in improving our game on social media, particularly if we want to appeal to young voters, and you can read it here.

I think he makes a particularly important point about the need for us to be clever in thinking about ensuring our social media strategy takes account of the filtering algorithms of the internet. I don't pretend to know what drives them, but I only have to look at the viewing figures for this blog to know the8r impacts can be counterintuitive.

For the past five years the number of daily pageviews on this blog has varied between about 250 - though it's usually not that low - and about 2,000 (it's not often that high.) It goes through dry periods of weeks at a time when the daily hit rate is about 500 and then occasionally will run for some time at more like 1,500 hits a day - which is where the figures have been for the past fortnight.

Looking at which individual posts have had the most traffic one might almost be tempted to conclude that the anonymous poster who had a pop at me over Whitehaven School a fortnight ago on an education and training thread may have done me a favour by boosting the traffic figures. I think at least some of the regular readers must have been having a repeated look at the thread on which we had a little spat to see if there were any more comments there.

And then, the more traffic a site gets the more the search engines and other algorithms will send to it.

Whatever else you say about the Labour party, their social media campaigns are generally pretty effective. This is an issue on which Conservatives need to learn from them. Fast.

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