Our Year in Blogging and Social Media!
Written by George Peckham, International Training Programme Assistant
We wanted to share with you a summary of our year in blogging and on social media. 2020 was a disruptive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite not being able to work for much of the last 12-months, we have had a very successful year for the ITP blog and for social media. 2020 was our first full year of using the new ITP blogsite after switching sites in July 2019. We are very happy with our last year online, so we are sharing our data below.
Blogging
In 2020 we published 68 blog posts, with 23 of those including contributions from ITP fellows. Our total blogsite views for 2020 was 15,755 views. Despite being inactive for much of the year, we saw at 33% increase on total website views on the previous year. We also had 6652 unique website visitors, a 98.5% increase in visitors compared to 2019! We have been committed to publishing at least two blogs a week, so we look forward to sharing even more with you in 2021.
Top 3 most popular blogs in 2020:
- ITP 2020: Applications for Egypt Now Open! 5 February 2020 – 1210 Views
- Collections Access in the Time of COVID-19 – 30 September 2020 – 215 Views
- The ITP Network Share Heritage and Cultures for World Heritage Day – 162 Views
February was our most popular month in 2020, with 3071 views. This happened to be the month that we published our most popular blog of the year.
We introduced a couple of new series of blogs this year which we hope you have enjoyed. ITP from Home encouraged members of the networks to share updates of their experiences working from home or living through lockdowns caused by the global pandemic.
Unfortunately we couldn’t have a Summer Programme this year, but on the blog we have been reminiscing and looking back at our projects from years gone by with #ThrowbackThursday. You can read all of our entries so far by clicking on the link!
We mentioned that we had 23 blog contributions from ITP fellows in 2020. We would like to say a big thank to everyone in the network who wrote for the blog over the last year:
- Aprille Tijam (Philippines, ITP Fellow 2019)
- Andrea Terron Gomez (Guatemala, ITP Fellow 2017, Senior Fellow 2018)
- Saeed Bayashoot (Yemen, ITP Fellow 2016)
- Namrata Sarmah (India, ITP Fellow 2018)
- Asmaa El Rabat (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2014)
- Sanjeewani Upaka Widyarathne (Sri Lanka, ITP Fellow 2019)
- Vishi Upadhyay (India, ITP Fellow 2019)
- Dikko Idris (Nigeria, ITP Fellow 2011)
- Chantal Umuhoza (Rwanda, ITP Fellow 2018)
- Ala Talebian (Iran, ITP Fellow 2017)
- Khadijeh Zohreh Baseri (Iran, ITP Fellow 2007)
- Shreen Amin (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2016)
- Nourah Sammar (Palestine, ITP Fellow 2009)
- Nagwa Bakr (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2019)
- Ahmed Hemida (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2016)
- Noor Hassan (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2017)
- Wesam Mohamed (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2015)
- Hayk Mkrtchyan (Armenia, ITP Fellow 2014, Senior Fellow 2017)
We wanted to highlight our top three contributors to the ITP blog in 2020. So a special thank you to Namrata Sarmah (4 blogs), Nagwa Bakr (4 blogs), and Aprille Tijam who contributed to an amazing 8 blogs in 2020!!
Is your ITP year or country missing from the list contributors? If so, the ITP network would love to hear from you in 2021!
Here are the top 10 ITP countries from which people viewed the blog in 2020:
- Egypt – 1909 views
- India – 953 views
- Philippines – 728 views
- Malaysia – 295 views
- Turkey – 272 views
- Palestine – 225 views
- Iraq – 163 views
- China – 122 views
- Uzbekistan – 117 views
- Armenia – 110 views
Social Media
2020 was also a good year for the ITP on social media. Facebook remains the most popular referrer to the blog. When we have shared a blog on Facebook, you clicked on the link 3030 times. We were also happy to see a jump in referrals from Twitter over the last year, which gave the blog 474 referrals in 2020.
In 2020 the ITP team made 228 posts in the ITP Facebook Group and received 5609 reactions and comments. We tweeted 90 times in 2020 from the ITP Twitter page and received 2461 engagements. We now have 1137 followers on Twitter, so give us follow if you haven’t yet!
2020 was also the year we launched the ITP Instagram page! We’ve enjoyed sharing photos from old ITP summer programmes and legacy projects. In our first year we have posted 28 times and amassed 150 followers! You can see our most popular post from 2020 below, where we announced our return from special furlough leave and our latest #ThrowbackThursday blog. Give us a follow on Instagram to see our latest updates there!
We hope you have enjoyed the ITP blog in 2020, both as a resource and networking platform. We have some exciting plans for the blogsite in 2021, so stay tuned for updates!
We hope you will continue to engage with us online throughout 2021. We would love to hear from you on the blog and our social media pages!