In October 2022, the Catholic Social Media team compared and contrasted diocesan social media audiences versus parish audiences in several different U.S. dioceses and archdioceses. Here's what we found:
No matter what, only a small number of people follow the diocese
At best, in certain small U.S. dioceses (<250,000 Catholics), about eight percent of baptized Catholics followed the diocesan social media accounts. In larger dioceses, the percentage was between 0.5-2.5%. In short, no matter how hard diocesan communications officials work, only a small number of committed Catholics who are already "interested in the hierarchy" will ever follow the diocese. As a result, diocesan messages are restricted to Chruch insiders, no matter how much energy is put into growing the audience beyond that group.
Only a small number of parishes will reshare content from the diocesan social media channels
Even in large dioceses (>100 parishes), only about two percent of parishes will ever consistently reshare content from the diocesan social media channels to their own channels. Tracking down a post and re-sharing it is too heavy a life for most busy parish employees and volunteers.
COVID led to explosive growth in parish social media audiences
Even the smallest parish in the United States now has more than 250 followers on Facebook. 14-56% of baptized Catholics in a diocese follow their parish online. This makes sense, given it's at the parish where the vast majority of Catholics experience the Church.
What are the implications?
Parish social media audiences, when taken together, constitute a constituency that is 5.6-100 times larger than the diocesan social media audience. For dioceses that already produce great content, the question is how to reach this extremely large audience. Catholic Social Media: Diocesan Essentials is the perfect tool to do this, giving parishes a robust multi-platform scheduler and allowing the diocese to feed content directly to those parishes.