Onwards and upwards — 50,000 social media followers at the Institute of Cancer Research
It's a completely arbitrary milestone but The Institute of Cancer Research — where I work as the Digital Strategy Manager — has now reached a social media audience of over 50K followers/subscribers!
This milestone — which happened at some point in the last few days — is calculated by combining followers/subscribers across different platforms so while it clearly doesn't represent 50,000 unique individuals, I'm still very happy with reaching this point.
When I started at the ICR (Jan 2016) I estimate that we had 12–14K followers. Back them, I was less diligent at collecting this data; if you don't manually collect it there is no easy way to obtain such historical data. Now I routinely collect data each week (spreadsheets are your friend).
Here's how the top four platforms have changed over time. Facebook and LinkedIn have been battling it out for quite a while but LinkedIn has emerged as the clear victor!
The sudden jump in Twitter followers last year was from a single news story going viral (deservedly so)!
Our other platforms (YouTube, Pinterest, and Apple News) are all in the triple-digit range for followers. However, Apple News is our fastest growing platform (admittedly easier to start from a low base), growing 173% in 2019.
As far as I can tell, we are one of only a few academic science institutions that has created an Apple News channel, and only the second cancer research organisation to have a presence (just search Apple News for 'cancer research' and scroll down to the list of channels to find us!).
Next stop, 100K followers! Though I'll also be happy to see Instagram reach 10K (this is when you unlock the power of adding 'swipe up' links to story posts!).