The Friends of Northampton Castle have been going from strength to strength and the success story continues with this quick report into the impact our web presence has had.
The castle reconstruction video has been uploaded to youtube, has received 376 views since July 6, and has seen 7 positive ratings (0 negative) and 1 short but positive comment saying “this is amazing” which itself received two positive ratings. This is pretty good for youtube. The video is also now at the top of the youtube search results for “Northampton Castle”, beating the station-related videos to the top spot.
July was our busiest month to date on the website, enjoying 729 visitors, up from 329 the previous month. Most of the new visitors came from increased search engine prominence and also towards the end of the month we enjoyed some visits from our new Facebook and Twitter accounts.
We set up an account on each of these social networks up the 23rd of July, and added links to the accounts from our website. As at August 3rd, our Twitter account has 62 followers and our Facebook page has 69. Twitter is helping to build a more geographically wide following; with prominent followers of our account including the Royal Mint, The Medieval Siege Society and Oxford Archaeology, as well as plenty of local people and organisations, whereas the Facebook followers consist more of people than organisations, and are more tightly focused on Northamptonshire.
We have had an excellent welcome on both networks, with many of our tweets being copied to our followers’ followers (known as being re-tweeted), and our Facebook posts being “liked” which similarly shares that content with the liker’s friends. This is an excellent sign that we are producing content that people enjoy and identify with, and helps widen our reach.
In the future we hope to use these new channels of communication to help spread information FoNC news, with the website remaining as a more permanent/definitive/formal source.
You can join in the conversation and follow us on twitter, or join our facebook page.
