Measuring engagement levels is always hard. But, this is an important metric for FunDza. We need and want to understand who we are reaching through our online stories, and whether or not they are relating to our content. Social media can be a great way to measure engagement. One method of gauging our interaction with readers is through monitoring the comments that we receive on our stories. At the moment, readers collectively send in more than 100 comments per DAY! In general this means more than 1,500 people commenting each month and submitting in excess of 3,000 new comments every month.
This is really heartening for us at FunDza. Knowing we are enticing the readers not just to read the stories, but to get involved, comment and be heard. This indicates to us that our readers are not just reading, but also forming opinions and learning to have the confidence to share these too. These are important parts of the ‘reading for pleasure’ experience. It is wonderful to see our readers bring passion and opinion to the stories, to engage with other readers on the story. It is also heartening for the writers to see how readers are reacting to their work.
To encourage activity, we have started a ‘campaign’ of #commentWednesdays. For this we select one of our favourite comments from the previous Friday’s story and showcase it on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. It’s a fun way for a reader see their name up on our site, and rally up some creative thinking on the readers part – what could they write that would be featured on our page?
Having started this on 27 July, we are just two comments in and we are eager to see what #commentWednesdays brings up in the coming weeks!