The City of River Falls is doing its part to get community support and COVID-19 info out, and people are visiting its Facebook page, but not as many take the time to either “like” or “follow” the City, at least if the Facebook statistics are reliable. Shall we scroll?

Starting out the week of August 24 to August 30, there were 6,597 total visits to the City Facebook page, with just five new likes and five decisions to “follow” the municipality. The week following there were 11,798 total visits to the River Falls city Facebook page, with just three new “likes” and four “follows” registered for and by the City. Moving on to the week of September 7 to September 13, there were a total of 12,484 visits to the City Facebook page, with just four new “likes” and six “follows.” This latter pattern saw two spikes, meanwhile, hitting the upper teens with a high of 17 new “likes” and 19 “follows” for the weeks beginning September 21 and October 19, the pattern holding at 15 likes and 18 follows for the week beginning September 28 with 11 new likes and 13 “follows” for the week beginning October 26. Meanwhile the number of total visits to the City of River Falls Facebook page would surge greatly in the two weeks leading up to the election, jumping 25, 023 visits for the week beginning October 19 (compared to the week before) and reaching 40,202 or over twice River Fall’s population, before dropping down to a relatively sanguine 21,084 views the week beginning October 26. There was also a steady increase in visits for the three weeks leading to September 28, with a peak of 24,282 total weekly visits that fell the next week to just 10,860.

Shifting from Facebook to COVID-19 page visits, there were 372 unduplicated visits to the City’s COVID19 informational webpage (www.rfcity.org/covid19) for the week of August 14, while the three weeks following saw 338, 385, and 561 unduplicated visits. With two consecutive weeks at 556 unduplicated visits beginning the week of September 21, the visits began to drop, with the four weeks leading up the election seeing 404, 364, 296, and 391 unduplicated visits to the City’s COVID information page. The Library’s Community Care Page saw lower number, spiking in the middle to 57 unduplicated visits the week of September 21, the second highest number being 49 visits the week before. Luckily, the number of visits for the Library’s Community Support Facebook page was a bit higher, peaking out at 9,912 total visits the week of September 6 and bottoming out to 1,824 total visits the week of October 18. Library like and follow statistics, meanwhile, were little different than the River Falls city Facebook page, while the click to open ratio for the monthly newsletter was somewhat better. To be specific, there were 1,116 clicks on the all segment category with 30 opens for September, while there were 1,247 clicks and 42 opens for the month following. For November 1, the numbers came out to 1,038 clicks and 52 opens for the newsletter, while the library received over 2,600 phone calls and 1,800 curbside pickup appointments for October.