Twitter, Facebook and me

I don't pretend to blog because I have a huge audience craving my thoughts. After five years of Dispatches, my stats are laughably minuscule. My Daily Photo audience has been even smaller, mostly because I have no text on that blog that a search engine can grab onto. But lately, the situation has reversed. My Daily Photo traffic is double, sometimes triple that of the written blog. Why? 

Facebook. 

Since I began micro-blogging on Twitter, and feeding that stream to Facebook, the number of people who are paying attention to what I do has multiplied severalfold. I suspect that many people who pay attention to web information have migrated their reading to the social media sites, and that has knocked back readership stats on a lot of personal blogs. My numbers on Dispatches have been trending downwards for the past year. But every day I get several new Twitter followers.

Some of those are social media parasites responding to a search term, and I will often block those if their website link or their posts look too smarmy. But many are readers that appear genuinely interested in what I have to say. Just like in the beginning of the blog craze several years ago. 

I cross post everything―blog posts go to Facebook. Twitter posts show up on the blog and Facebook. But I noticed a big uptick on Daily Photo traffic when I made a separate entry on Facebook, with the photo. Text didn't drive traffic. A photo did. I post to both platforms now, every day. 

And my Daily Photo traffic has soared. 

Comments

[Aaron]

The shift to the more social web is a big one... we're seeing more and more average/non-geek folks that are using sites like Facebook and Twitter when they previously weren't engaged with blogs.

I run Social Photo Talk, a site all about social media for photographers. If you're interested, I'd love to do a brief interview with you for the site. Drop me a note at the email address I'm leaving here... it would be great to share some of your thoughts with my audience.

[Jeff H]

I have subscribed to your daily photo post and Dispatches posts via Google RSS Reader for quite some time. I view the photo and your posts in Google reader and don't always visit the web page. I don't know if your web site statistics pick this up or not. Are you able to see how many people view your Dispatches posts via news readers?

[Doug Plummer]

It would be nice to think that my audience is much larger than I can see. I have no idea if Google Analytics picks up subscribers or not. I have practically no understanding of how it works.