Manchester’s Finest Group is thrilled to announce that Proper Manchester has been confirmed as the most engaged and fastest growing local news publisher in the UK.
Ranked by Facebook’s monitoring platform CrowdTangle, Proper Manchester had the most interactions (18.81 million) all UK local news publishers for the whole of 2022, and the biggest percentage growth in followers when compared to all global media.
The growth has been an incredible 24.24% – double that of their next nearest competitor Wales Online who ranked 2nd with 12.62%, and considerably ahead of the average growth of 7.21% across all other UK local media.
Impressively, Proper Manchester also made the top 10 (based on interactions) for all UK national media, ranking 8th just behind Sky News.
Proper Manchester is part of Manchester’s Finest Group and has rapidly grown to become one of the North West’s most influential news platforms. An incredible feat that has been achieved by a comparatively small team, creating a fraction of the output of the established media platforms, in just three years since the platform’s inception.
2022 has seen the Proper team navigate a range of content from national breaking news stories, original features, client content, and new video series’ – the latest of which ‘Proper Scran’ is in partnership with Uber Eats.
Part of the growth strategy was to increase the unique video content and Proper started growing the video team in spring, recruiting Eleanor Ingleby (formerly at LADbible Group) as Social Video Manager. Consequently, viewed minutes on video content shot up immediately and the rest of the year continued to go from strength to strength. In December alone 112 million people were reached on Facebook – another record number – racking up millions of interactions and growing the page by nearly 20,000 new followers that month. A fantastic result to end the year on.
Jamie Roberts, Head of Content for Proper Manchester, said: “I’m absolutely buzzing that we’ve achieved this, especially with such a small but dedicated team, managing to compete with and overtake the big, established local publishers, like M.E.N and Wales Online.
Sticking to our strategy of posting the most relatable content for our audience and never missing a trick with breaking news stories, we managed to keep it steady and maintain our goal of being the most engaged local publisher in the entire UK on Facebook.
To see the enormous growth in our page is special for us as a small team, with 168k new Facebook followers joining us for the ride this year, and we can’t wait to carry this success on into 2023!”
Sophia Crilly, Business Development Director for Manchester’s Finest Group, said: “We’re so proud of what Jamie and the team on Proper have achieved in the past year – it’s a fantastic result for a small team creating a fraction of the output of the established media platforms, so the quality of content speaks for itself.
2022 was an exciting year of growth for the whole group as we grew to 22 strong and moved to new 2,650 sq ft premises in the Northern Quarter, as well as growing our combined social following to well over 2 million.
We have ambitious plans for Manchester’s Finest Group and Proper Manchester is an integral part of our growth strategy as we welcome a new writer to the Proper team this month and prepare to expand the video team.
We’re looking forward to maintaining our position as the most engaged and fastest growing local news publisher in the UK and to growing our lead from 2nd to rank 1st for national and global news interactions in 2023, as well as aiming for the top 5 for all UK national media.
Manchester is unique in that we have a few competitors in the space we occupy as publishers, but we are looking to cement our lead and position ourselves as the largest and leading lifestyle and news publisher here.”
