When I created this blog in 2007, I hardly knew what social media was. Twitter and Facebook existed. I soon joined Facebook more because our child was there and had moved outside Iowa. I was not on social media to promote this blog by posting links.
Over the years, I moved through numerous social media accounts. The main ones remaining are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I developed different editorial values for each and used Twitter and LinkedIn as main vehicles to promote my blog. The various WordPress applications are by far the largest source of my views. With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, everything is changing.
In April WordPress sent a message that the Twitter API was no longer working. That means links to my articles could not automatically post on Twitter. The problem is not fixed. I continued to manually post on Twitter yet to no avail. Traffic from Twitter to my blog dropped by 58 percent beginning in May.
Determining the cause of traffic loss is a dubious proposition. My blog has small viewership compared to most news organizations and popular blogs. Losing a few regular readers who linked from Twitter makes a difference in my world. I suspect the reason Twitter referrals declined was people were leaving the platform rather than discrimination by the designers of what became X. Whatever happened, a number of factors — loss of the API, changes by X in who saw my posts, and my readers leaving X for other platforms — Twitter became less relevant to my writing.
At the same time my referrals were in decline, National Public Radio got into a spat with X over how they were described. Because of it, they and some of their affiliates ceased posting on X in early April. What they found is it made a negligible difference in the number of views they experienced on their website. In short, it wasn’t worth the work, from a viewership standpoint, to post on the X platform. Because each reader is important to my overall viewership, my problems are not the same as NPR if my conclusion about whether it is worth the work is similar.
What does all this mean? Less time on X, more time focused on my writing, and some thought given to how I expand readership. While social media is a good place to meet and make friends and acquaintances, it is not the reason we blog. It begins with having something meaningful to say with which readers will engage. It also means working to keep readers coming back for more. I’m not sure X ever did that for me and soon it will be time to move on. In the meanwhile, I hope readers will pass along a link to my blog to a friend when they find meaningful content here. It’s an organic way of growing viewership, and may be the most enduring.
Thank you for reading my post.
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