Social Media Stats; August 2017.
Social Media Statistics - August 2017
Blogging is a weird old thing isn't it? In June I was on jury service and I didn't tweet as much and I had a dip in my stats and then in July I had a corker and my stats went back to normal. So now we've eased into September and I checked my August statistics and whadda ya know - back in the dip.
After reading Megan's latest social media report I have come to a conclusion I was eeking toward myself and that is - my statistics fluctuate depending on how popular my Pinterest posts are. My daily stats on my blog are around 1000 a day with around 31K per month average. Sometimes something whack happens like when I had 64K views in January but most of the time they're pretty steady. But, and here's the big but, my viral pins are dated now, they're over a year old and people don't see them that much and that in turn makes my blog stats ebb and flow depending how much they're re pinned.
Sure this month I didn't promote my new content quite as much, my Pinterest game was almost non existent and I didn't find time to schedule tweets till about 3pm every day but definitely my stats went down as my Pinterest views went down. What's interesting to me is I was around 700 views per day consistently, much like in June so maybe that's my TRUE following when my pins are taken out of the equation.
Instagram;
Instagram has been playing it's old tricks again, like I don't even know what to report? I haven't had any more followers, I'm still floating around 180 despite apparently having new followers every day but that's the algorithm for you ain't it? My Insta stories get more and more views which is lovely and a move I kinda expect Insta will take but my grid is very much the same.
Posting one time a day worked like a charm for about 3 days and then my stats went back to normal around 80 per day but sometimes as low as 50 for no apparent reason. I tried posting multiple times, I tried tagging local regram accounts, I tried hashtags in comments and hashtags in the caption. I tried everything and some posts did well and some bombed and I don't think anyone knows what Insta are playing at.
And then to top it all off, you might have seen on the old blog that I got shadowbanned. Whaheyyy isn't Instagram just a gem? I was only shadowbanned for about 2 or 3 days and I beat it by changing up my hashtags but the hashtags that I use now are less well researched so I haven't seen an influx in engagement or following anyway.
Twitter;
So Twitter was a funny old one for me this month - like I said above I found myself too busy to schedule tweets properly a lot of the month and that really impacted my statistics, both on the platform itself and on my blog. I started the month really well, I had all the motivation from my new blog look but it kinda filtered off toward the middle of the month and afterward. Working from home means I'm in charge of my own schedule and I often found myself thinking 'I'll write that post and then schedule tweets' only for something to crop up and that post (and the tweets) not be written till 9pm.
The other thing that's massively affected my Twitter is I went through my following list and had a mass blocking session. After one too many accounts following me that had a dick pic as their profile I thought it was about time I checked who was really on my account and it resulted in nearly 500 accounts being blocked. Scary huh? This obviously massively culled my following list which I was gutted about because I was so close to 4K (and maybe my end goal of 5K by 2018) but best I did it.
Despite not tweeting as much and thinking it had an impact on my stats I actually improved in every area (except following obvs) so I guess what I tweeted was more valuable or people liked it more? I actually somehow ended up tweeting more in August than I had in July but literally by about 18 tweets and my overall impressions went from 132K to 159K. I did manage a singular chat this month which was lively which I have no doubt contributed to my growth in profile visits (up to 3188 from 2697) but bizarrely my mentions were down from just over 600 to just over 500.
Possibly the most interesting statistic is actually my following count. My current following stands at 3469 and when I started my mass blocking I had just hit over 3930 suggesting I lost around about 460 followers. However, when you look at my Twitter analytics it says that between July and August I only lost 88 followers which means that despite blocking a load, I had actually gained a few hundred in the first place which is nice. Hopefully I can build on this in September.
Also Tesco followed me and Hannah Gale liked a tweet I posted so I think I'm famous now?
Pinterest;
Like I mentioned above, I have basically been non existent over on Pinterest this month after professing to be such a whizz at it in July. I really wanted to continue my aim of repinning 10 items for every board on my feed every few days but life just gets in the way sometimes and it becomes a bigger task in your mind than it really is.
It doesn't overly surprise me, I used to be the same in uni having massive pinning binges and then not using the platform for like 3 months but it has impacted on my stats. I gained around 145 followers taking me to 3444 which is fine but like this time last year I used to get 100 a day so not the biggest growth I've ever had. That being said my views went from 1,429,000 to around 1,449,000 which is nice.
Bloglovin;
Not a lot to report as ever but after taking a little following hit (literally lost like 7) last month I'm back up to 570 which is the biggest leap I've seen in a while.
Google Analytics;
I feel like I've basically covered the who the what and the way in my intro so it'll come as no surprise to you then that after 1000 views per day in July I went back down to around 700. I did take a break at the beginning of the month for my new blog which meant I had no content and nobody had access to my blog but based on GA results the main difference was how much traffic my viral pins had.
In August I had 24,392 views (my lowest since June 2016 which was just over 16K FYI) by just over 14.5K people. My returning visitors is ever growing though and my bounce rate is every decreasing which are both movements I like to see. I did say I'd likely tip over the half a million all time pageviews in September which is still reachable (I'm just over 485K) but depends on me having a similar or better month as last so here's hoping.
One other little tit bit for you is my DA went up to 26 which is whopping considering it was at 21 at the last check and if I could just get time to fix those broken links I'd be grand.
Overall verdict? I think the majority of control was out of my hands but I definitely could've done better. I say I'll change but we all know I won't.....
