WordPress Microblogging Experiment: Statistics Speak ~ Blaugust Day 19
This is part of the Blaugust series!
I interrupt my trip down nostalgia lane to look at blog statistics. Super interesting, right?
Well, I’ve seen a number of folks posting about blog statistics during Blaugust, discussing how stats jumped up for the month, or how traffic has changed over time. Since this is still a new blog, I’m less concerned about measuring this month against previous months – I know there will be a significant jump in stats during Blaugust.
Instead, I’m more curious to continue to test if a WordPress microblog like this can post the same content but be more successful than a Tumblr microblog.
I posed the question a while back: Does anyone actually microblog with WordPress? And if not… why not?
I first started posting on my Tumblr blog in May 2011. I’ve had some off months, but for the most part, I’ve used Tumblr consistently. More recently, I’ve filtered just about all posts I write here to also post on my Tumblr blog, so both blogs are getting the same kind of content. I sometimes stop by the dashboard and “Like” posts written by people I follow. I sometimes stop by tags like the FFXIV tag and like posts by people I don’t follow. I rarely follow new people, however, because my dashboard is a total mess already. I do subscribe to my favorite Tumblr blogs in Feedly, and keep up with them in my RSS reader.
Let’s see the kind of engagement I get there over the past 30 days.
“Notes” include Likes, Reblogs and comments. I rarely get comments or reblogs. So basically, of all the content I posted the past 30 days, 102 times, someone acknowledged it existed. This included a piece of FFXIV fan art of a popular character on August 3, which got the most attention.
There is no way to see how many people actually read my content since it just gets filtered into the dashboards of those who follow me. Now, I may have 458 followers, but I don’t know how many of those are active, are bots, or just scroll on past anything that I post. That’s the thing about Tumblr. There’s more content out there than any one mind could consume, so a majority of your stuff will probably just get scrolled by.
Hence my thought that microblogging on a WordPress could be more effective. Now that this blog is slowly becoming noticed, especially with the help of Blaugust, I say that I have overall more meaningful interactions with the same content on WordPress than I do with Tumblr.
Here’s some more WordPress stats.
Also, the stats at the top of the page note that in August alone, I’ve had 159 comments over the past 17 days. This does not measure likes and visits. Compare this to the Tumblr Notes for a whole 30 days – 102 – and those do include mostly likes, some reblogs and a very few actual comments.
Looking at all this, I do feel pretty good about the choice I made to move my microblogging from Tumblr to WordPress. Blaugust certainly helped to give it a boost, but it seems a WordPress blog that feeds back into other social networks like Twitter, Tumblr and Anook is a more effective way to go in the long run.
I’ll continue to conduct my experiment to see how statistics end up after August is over.