Social Media & Blog Statistics - December 2017
SOCIAL MEDIA STATISTICS - DECEMBER 2017.
Firstly before we get into the ol' blog stats report I just want to apologise a lil, or maybe explain is a better word, for my lack of blog posts this month. I wanted to get stuck into the new year and I really have.....in all other aspects of my life.
My new years resolutions are going ok, I am fitting in Welsh, yoga and reading when I can and I have had a huge de clutter of the house. Joss was away for 6 days last week and I blitzed the place which took up all of my time and now we're having a testing week at home with family and frankly, the blog and my mission to get up and go for the new year just fell by the wayside. It doesn't help that my blog sees A LOT of traffic in January due to new year new bullet journals so I have barely bothered to worry about it, let alone schedule a single tweet, knowing my stats will be better than ever without even trying.
Hopefully things will calm down by the end of the week and I can get back into the swing of it because believe me I want to. I am itching to get typing and I have some (what I think are) great ideas I just don't have the time or energy to type it out by the time I come in at the end of the day. That being said I didn't just miss my Friday Favourites last week, they are officially gone and not coming back. I might replace them with something, I might just do one every now and then I might never post on a Friday ever again but for now, they were just getting tedious to write so they've been binned with 2017.
But for now, finally finally, onto the stats of December last year.
Instagram;
Last month I apparently said I had around 180 followers which was a fun little typo for me to make. Instagram over Christmas I really really enjoyed. A lot of my winter photo challenge was based on Christmassy things and I loved ticking them off and it made a really fun feed for me to curate. I really enjoyed snapping all my decorations and everything I got up to over the festive period and I was really digging the darker sparklier tones with the occasional pop of red but I have to say I am much more enjoying the lighter theme I have going on now. By the time 2018 rolled around I was desperate for a change and it took a while to move away from dark colours into lighter whites and blues but I am just about getting there now. I can see what's coming on my UNUM grid and I think it's going to work so fingers crossed you think so too.
I also had a little recap over the past year which I documented on my Instagram stories last week or the week before. I searched all my own photos over 2017 and saved any that had over 100 likes and looked to see if I could work out what made them successful. I was firstly surprised at how many there were when I felt like Insta was dying a death and also how clearly you could see when the algorithm killed me off.
Apart from the few that I loved that bombed and the few that I didn't think were amazing that soared, there were some real trends I found in my own photos that continuously did well and I plan on implementing in my 2018 grid too. I'd urge you to have the same reflection on your own year if you're wondering where to take your feed because I found it super helpful!
Stats wise I've been dropping more than I've been gaining and whilst I was stuck around 1180 religiously in November I am more on the 1160 mark and floating about round there.
Twitter;
December feels like so long ago in the past I barely remember if I picked up some slack on November's lack of engagement or not. I feel like I did because I had my Christmas blog series on the go so I'm sure I tried to promote that as much as I could but it certainly wasn't anything like the levels of a year ago when I was in all the twitter chats going.
On reflection it turns out I didn't tweet ALL that much, just over 350 times and my impressions stayed at around 70K but that doesn't shock me. With it being Christmas and people taking time off work, time off social media and time with their families I certainly wasn't engaging on Twitter much at all so it's no shock to me that other people weren't either. My profile visits however did rise from 1.1K in November to 1.6K in December and I had more mentions and followers too. My final count of the year was 3680 followers and about a million creepy accounts on the blocked list.
Pinterest;
I didn't really have the time to get all Pinterest happy but I did pin a bunch of DIYs and christmassy things because they were everywhere and omfg Christmas. On the plus side this January I have created a new board and I am really enjoying pinning again so maybs that combined with my bullet journal stuff will result in a load of followers.
For December though my following went up to 3680 which again is a small jump but a jump none the less. My impressions though soared from 1.6 million to over 2 million for the month which was 100% down to my bullet journal pins doing well again in the last week.
My Bullet Journal
board - follow here!
Google Analytics;
I have changed my blog schedule in recent months to creating less content which is being seen more but in December due to my Christmas series I had constant content for most of the month and my stats were actually really positive for it.
My monthly pageviews in December rose from 23,497 to 27,851 which is achingly close to 30,000 which always used to be my average monthly count. My readership hit 17 and a half thousand and my DA remained at 27 which is really sweet. My all time pageviews have risen to 578,324 and are looking like 1 million by the end of the year is very achievable.
The interesting part of my Google analytics this month was you could literally see the direct hit on my pageviews when everyone and their dog got a new bullet journal and scoured the internet for inspiration. My pageviews were around 600 a day as normal but literally come the 26th it smashed 1000 every day and was rising. Let me give you a clue as to how January is going for me - I have already overtaken the whole of December's pageviews and it's only halfway through the month.....
So to conclude this monthly round up of blog and social media statistics I thought I'd do a cheeky round up of the whole year. I looked back on my December 2016 blog stats post I wrote this time last year and I never tracked my Instagram following which was a big mistake. I don't think I'd hit 1K though so I've definitely improved!
I wrote a paragraph last January saying 'long gone are the days where I have 200K impressions and 500 new followers a month' and lol I literally can't remember that that even happened! I didn't write down how big my following was but I did say I had 100K impressions and 150 new followers which I said was rubbish. If only I could've looked into the future....
Thank god I wrote down my Pinterest following which was apparently 1.9K in December 2016 which is actually a relief to read because I felt like my following didn't massively grow in the last year. That being said I went from 1.9 to 3.6K so I obviously did something right after all!
Again with Bloglovin I thought my growth on that was minimal and every month I'd complain, I don't know how to grow a following and I would say "I'm not reporting on this again". However I apparently ended 2016 with 347 followers on the platform and now I have 604 so actually it grew way more than I thought!
And finally, Google analytics and the ol' blog. I had a cracking year in 2016 there's really no denying it but I really felt like in 2017 my blog didn't grow in quite the BOOM way as it did previously. But then I looked at my GA stats. I ended 2016 with 223,926 pageviews which was hella amazing for a year and I actually had 354,398 pageviews in 2017 so I did grow much more than I thought. Definitely worth revisiting last years stats if you want to see how you've actually done!
