CDC publishes social media metrics on dashboard

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is showcasing its digital activity in a new dashboard with data on website and social media use.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have put their social media metrics online to show patterns such as spikes in YouTube views and growth in Twitter followers.

For example, CDC had a sharp increase in YouTube views at the start of the influenza outbreak in April 2009 and counts more than 1 million Twitter followers and 57,000 Facebook friends.

Those are just some of the social media metrics CDC has published online as part of its new eHealth Metrics Dashboard.


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The dashboard spans several Web pages. It offers charts and graphs with data on topics such as the number of visitors to CDC's website, most popular Web pages, visitor satisfaction, social media use and the top referral Web site. Most of the data runs through July 2010.

Overall, CDC.gov received 339 million page views from January to July 2010, of which nearly 10 million were for the home page, while 69 percent of visitors spent five minutes or less on the site.

Most of the visitors to CDC.gov are referred from the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing, CDC officials said.

Views from mobile devices rose sharply in January and February 2010 to 137,000 and 263,000, respectively, but dropped sharply to about 20,000 in March and remained at that lower level through July. No explanation was provided for the trend.

CDC e-cards peaked in 2009 with more than 200,000 viewed but dropped to 46,000 from January to July 2010.

CDC Emergency had the largest number of Twitter followers, with more than 1.2 million fans, and its Facebook page had more than 57,000 fans as of July 2010, according to the dashboard.