The Office of Innovation within the Office of the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (“R”), has put together a site that tracks the number of Facebook fans (1,016,643) for all the 191 pages that the State Department maintains domestically and overseas (h/t to mountainrunner.us).
The Dashboard gives an overall view by date, trend (going up), top gainers (eJournal USA with +509 fans gained on 9/11), bottom 5 losers and top pages (eJournal USA with 180,203 fans, followed by US Embassy Jakarta with 148,429 fans).
We have extracted the data for the top ten Facebook pages of US embassy/related post overseas according to number of fans below. Regional acronyms: EAP (East Asia Pacific), WHA (Western Hemisphere), SCA (South and Central Asia), NEA (Near East Asia, includes North Africa and Middle East) and AF (Sub-Saharan Africa). US Embassy Macedonia with 4,589 fans is the top European post but none of the EUR posts made it to the top ten pages.
|
City, Country
|
Name
|
Type
|
Region
|
# Fans
|
|
|
1
|
Jakarta,
Indonesia, |
U.S. Embassy – Jakarta, Indonesia
|
Embassy
|
EAP
|
148,429
|
|
2
|
Surabaya,
Indonesia, |
US Consulate General Surabaya
|
Consulate
|
EAP
|
31,668
|
|
3
|
Argentina,
Buenos Aires |
Centro de Recursos Informativos – Embajada de EE.UU. en Buenos Aires
|
IRC/BNC
|
WHA
|
23,728
|
|
4
|
Paraguay, Asuncion
|
Embajada de los Estados Unidos en Paraguay
|
Embassy
|
WHA
|
19,642
|
|
5
|
Bolivia,
La Paz |
Embajada de Estados Unidos en La Paz
|
Embassy
|
WHA
|
17,166
|
|
6
|
Sri Lanka, Colombo
|
U.S. Embassy Colombo, Sri Lanka
|
Embassy
|
SCA
|
16,040
|
|
7
|
South Africa, Pretoria
|
United States Mission to South Africa
|
Embassy
|
AF
|
14,461
|
|
8
|
Egypt, Cairo
|
Study USA-Egypt
|
Foreign/
Other |
NEA
|
11,445
|
|
9
|
Ecuador, Guayaquil
|
Consulado General de los Estados Unidos en Guayaquil
|
Consulate
|
WHA
|
11,062
|
|
10
|
Manila
Philippines |
U.S. Embassy, Manila Philippines
|
Embassy
|
EAP
|
9,202
|
Click here to see the links to all 191 pages with corresponding data. Given the normally smaller staffing at consulates compared to embassies, it is perhaps striking that Surabaya and Guayaquil’s are in the top list with over 10,000 fans (compared to say larger posts, like London, Paris, or Mexico City, all in the low thousands and have yet to break the 5,000 mark).
An about page has just been added to the site after I posted this blog entry. See below:
This project is a proof of concept (beta) which collects the total fan numbers for State Department Facebook fan pages. Since this is a beta, some of the numbers may be off and there may be gaps in the data.
Note: This only collects Facebook fan numbers and does not pull any information on participation rates, sentiment, personal participant details, or any other data. As such, it is a very high level view of the activity taking place on these pages and is, at best, a crude measurement of how successful these pages are.
How this works: The system queries Facebook’s open graph once a day and gets the fan totals at that moment. Since you need authentication to pull more specific information (comment rates, likes, etc) the dashboard just pulls public data.