ONS Digital

We like to create content specifically for our followers on social media and the Christmas period is the perfect time to pull out interesting stats that may be overlooked throughout the year.

Last December we pulled content from across the Government Statistical Service to create a quiz using polls (#quizmas) and shared the 12 tweets of Christmas based on PRODCOM data. This year we decided to create a statistical advent calendar.

We worked with our design colleagues and data journalists to gather interesting, Christmas-related statistics from across the office. This year we covered a wide range of subjects across economic and social statistics.

Our introductory tweet and Facebook post had the highest engagement of all posts during December. The kick-off tweet (seen below) had over 101,000 impressions and over 1,100 engagements. Our Facebook post had over 320 reactions, comments or shares and over 550 post clicks. Considering these posts didn’t have anything to ‘engage’ with (no link or image attachment) these high engagement metrics were a nice surprise.

https://www.facebook.com/ONS/posts/1168161859932333

Our followers shared the advent calendar, alerting their friends to the content. We loved seeing comments such as “the only Advent calendar I recognise”, “This looks like the start of a great nerd thread”, “best advent calendar I’ve seen”, and even, “I really hate myself for being excited about this!”. It’s safe to say our followers were in eager anticipation.

The posts started interesting debates, everyone had a personal favourite.

https://twitter.com/AlisonWride/status/806920169658445824

It’s a tough call but our favourites were the classic Rudloph stat…

… and one born every minute!

The consistent level of interest throughout the month has led to higher than average engagement metrics on our Facebook and Twitter channels. We’ve seen the full spectrum of ‘reactions’ from our Facebook followers, making an animated timeline for us this month.

This specific tweet brightened up our day, it’s always great to hear that people like what we’re doing on social:

Our overall top posts on Twitter were Christmas weddings and baby names. On Facebook, Rudolph came top followed by Christmas conceptions.

You can catch up with all of our advent tweets in one thread or visit our Facebook page.