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The First Lady Amai Grace Mugabe

Herald Reporter
IT is generally accepted that online audiences are a tough crowd to attract, given that they have access to an avalanche of content that competes for their attention on a multitude of platforms. It becomes noteworthy when online audiences can sustain a conversation around one issue or personality for more than a few hours as is the case with the First Lady Amai Grace Mugabe’s just-ended #MeetThePeople ‘Thank You rallies.

A cursory glance on Zimbabwe’s cyberspace attests to the fact that First Lady hogged the cyber-limelight and dominated online conversations to the obscurity of virtually everything else. On the Twitter platform, for instance, the hashtag #GraceMugabe attracted 1 439 959 impressions from October 13-19 while the hashtag #MeetThePeople attracted 1 891 869 during the same period.

Impressions pertain to the actual interaction or engagement with a post on someone’s Twitter account.
Similarly the hashtag #DrAmai attracted 484 384 impressions with all three hashtags extending to an audience reach of 922 119 users.
The hashtags were powered by 504 users who generated 1 189 posts about the First Lady’s rallies on Twitter.

The Herald took the lead in generating content related to the First Lady’s rallies, leveraging on multimedia in the form of live blogs, sound-cloud audio clips and news stories which cumulatively attracted 410 249 hits, 344 comments reacting to coverage from October 3-18.

The content generated and posted on The Herald’s website also fed into the paper’s social networking platforms including Facebook where audience reached by the post increased by 1 364 percent owing to the high interest shown by readers in following the First Lady’s rallies.

Audience engagement on The Herald Facebook page increased by 137,4 percent translating to 25 000 users who participated in robust debates or shared content relating to the First Lady’s rallies.

It is fair to state that the First Lady’s rallies drew much attention online and held many users as captive audiences who simply could not ignore the political waves she was making.
Given that these analytics pertain mainly to platforms that The Herald owns (with the exception of the Twitter statistics which are ubiquitous), it stands to reason that the impact of the First Lady’s rallies online is far wider than indicated here as the above sample does not account for traffic, conversations and engagement that occurred on other websites, blogs or social media platforms.

The rallies have come and gone but while they lasted — they hogged the cyber-limelight and defied skeptics to dispute the First Lady’s immense appeal in terms of being a compelling topic for many.

In short, online users sat up and took notice — that’s no mean feat.