Social Media & Blog Statistics - March 2018.
Oh hi I started writing this and then got distracted in my own Instagram story archives trying to find a photo of a yellow floral Primark tea dress that I believed to be uncanny to an Asda tea dress. As it turns out the only difference was the Asda one was white flowers and the Primark one was blue and £2 cheaper. So there we go.
I had a funny old March and I think my stats match it. I found myself too busy to dedicate a lot of time to my blog and similarly my social media fell by the wayside with the exception of Instagram. I didn't really feel my blog this month, I wrote some stuff I was pleased with but I generally didn't write as much as I wanted and maybs that came off and that's why my stats dropped a little? Idk, let's get into it.
Instagram;
I have officially fallen back in love with Instagram again when it seems like everyone else is hating it more than ever. This is the only platform I have dedicated any time to this month and I definitely think that's because I have been enjoying it more as a user as well as a poster. I don't want to be one of these people like "I have stopped caring about numbers and that's why I like it again" but uhm, that's essentially what has happened. I have stopped paying attention to my following count and I legit don't care. I mean maybe if I dropped 100 followers we'd be discussing this again but for the mo, I hit 1200 a few times this month and that was fine by me when it dropped again.
I have become one of the chosen few who woke up to a chronological feed again one day last week and for the first day I hated it and now I love it again. It totally killed my likes and engagement for a few days and I put that down to other people having the change and seeing less content but it's gone back up a bit now so maybe it was just shit content. What has happened though is combined with a cull of 200 accounts I was following, I am seeing the content I want to see, on time and when it's done it's done. I am procrastinating WAY less and when the fresh content is fresh, it doesn't matter how many times I refresh, there's no content from 6 days ago and yeah, just generally enjoying it more.
I also like my own feed more. I have found a groove I am happy with, a mixture of home stuff, mugs, the ol' shot of your legs on a bed and the odd pic of me. I am pleased with the colours on my grid and the lack of editing is challenging me to take better pictures which I am quite enjoying too. I use 100 likes as my own personal marker for successful photos and a lot more having been reaching it which has been top dog.
If we're talking numbers I ended February on 1181 and I managed to hit 1200 quite early into the month which felt like a nice solid number. Obviously I unfollowed 200 accounts myself and understandably some of them unfollowed me back but actually I ended March on 1194 so I did pretty well not to get rid of my own 200 followers as well.
Twitter;
The less said about Twitter the best is my motto for March. I just didn't really bother with it, soz not soz Twitter is kinda dead for me. There's a few people I still tweet or who comment on my tweets or whatever who I still love but I don't do chats anymore and I just fucking hate most people on there? I just can't stand drama, I am fed up of shade or people having an opinion on the way someone else lives their life and ugh it just makes me want to stay off it.
I basically did promos some of the time and the only effort I put into it was my advertisers as it's still the platform I think they benefit from most but other than that I did very little and it's showed. My main problem is I can see a direct influence on my stats when I do tweet more but I just can't bring myself to do it half the time.
Stats wise then I only tweeted 300 times and that made my impressions dip massively from 111K to 70.8K and it's no surprise really. My mentions were also lower dropping from 215 to 115 but people viewing my profile jumped ridiculously from just 900 to 1239 so big props to whoever gave me a shoutout! Weirdly too I gained my most followers in a month for the last little while with a jump of 40 which took my end of month total to 3713.
Pinterest;
When I had time in March to spend on Pinterest I really went wild for it again. I am still very much in love with my blog photography inspo board and it's making me so motivated to create content like it for my blog and for Instagram. The downside is I actually haven't had as much time to spend on Pinterest as I'd like because I'm very much more a 'spend half an hour pin 1048932787 things' than 5 minutes and pin 10 things kinda gal. When we were delayed in Venice at the beginning of the month I really enjoyed it as a distraction and I can always see a big rise in followers when I'm more active.
I had 4052 followers at the end of February and I had 4178 by the time March was over and as we sit here a few days into April I toppled 4200. I live for the summer I gained 100+ followers a week but hey, god knows what was happening then. What was weird though was my impressions dropped from 2.2 million to 1.4 million which is an insane drop in a month and I am a little unsure on what happened to affect that. We'll see where April goes.
Blog Photography Inspiration
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Google Analytics;
I have very little to report when it comes to blog statistics for last month and that's majorly down to how much effort I did (or didn't in this case) put into it. I wrote less, what I did write was lower in quality or not shareable stuff like my 'year of yes' post which was my favourite one but won't pull the punters in.
My pageviews for the month were 23,598 which is actually the lowest they have been since November of last year which I think is 100% down to my own lack of thought when it came to when I posted and what I posted. On the plus side my readership was still healthy and my bounce rate was a little less which is a positive move in the right direction. My overall pageviews are 672,523 so here's hoping the rest of the year perks up so I can hit 1 mill by the beginning of 2019.
What I actually found the most interesting part of my social media & blog stats of this month was reading Megan's round up. We write really similar ones at the beginning of every month and as she publishes before me normally I get a really good insight into how the two compare. You can read her full stats report for March here but basically a lot of it is a really similar story to mine. I take our Twitter and Instagram stats with a pinch of salt because they're very individual accounts (for example she was much more active on Twitter than I was) but it's our blog comparisons I always pay attention to.
I have long called Lazy Thoughts my blog twin and it's for good reason - Megan and I write really similar content, we have really similar audiences and we both have a lot of traffic driven to our blogs through bullet journal posts doing well on Pinterest. It's why when we advertise with each other it works really well - because chances are if you like my stuff, you'll like hers and vice versa. It also means I can see what type of month she's had and whether or not mine looks the same and spoiler - it always does. She's had the slowest month on her blog with the smallest pageviews of the year too and hasn't had the traditional spike in traffic coming from Pinterest, something I can very much relate to and shows why my Pinterest impressions dropped by nearly 1 million.
Ok so neither of us know exactly what's caused it but when your blog is as similar as ours are, and a lot of our audience is the same people with the same habits it's good to know you're not the only one. Maybs now for April we can both have a miracle of a month that sees us with like 200K pageviews. That'd be nice huh?
