Laura Bolton - Assignment #3 - Social Media Website Analysis

Company: TechCrunch

Social Media Platform: Facebook page

Likes: 863,000; 63,000 “talking about this”

            TechCrunch is an online news source that focuses primarily on technology start-ups, however also reports on mainstream, corporate companies such as Apple and HP. As a relatively new, company based in San Francisco, TechCrunch is very active in most social media websites – Facebook as their most prominent platform. 863,000 is a competitive amount of likes, however the ratio between posting-likes and the page as a whole is around 1:10000. Since the postings are mainly articles and videos, there is little room for audience participation or user-submitted content. It seems that the page is more of an extension or call-to-action for Facebookers to visit TechCrunch.com. The page is also lacking in premiums (not one contest exists), which perhaps explains this as there is no incentive for people to like to photos, videos, articles etc. Participatory content is also low in numbers - for example, “what would you hack if you could?” is a form of participatory content; it encouraged 31 people to comment, however, this is still insignificant to the 800,000+ likes. There is no customer service portal, but due to the news (as opposed to product) nature of the company, customer service isn’t especially essential, say compared to Apple for example.

On the other hand, I’d say that the content flow is excellent. On average the past week, there has been around 18 new pieces of content per day. Videos, articles, current market trends, and hashtags are constantly being posted around the clock and this variety of content makes the posts less repetitive and the user doesn’t always know what to expect. Recent tech news, TechCrunch event updates, how-to guides for new products, are all just a few of the types of content, and I think the company does a great job, especially compared to its competitors such as the Verge, in generating new and engaging content every hour of the day which permeates in the 800,000+ likes.