Both Twitter and Facebook have made it much more difficult to extract the data about how successful my own posts of my own material have been. A bit of manual number-crunching leads me to the conclusion that my top post on Facebook for the year, with the most likes and the most comments, was my birthday celebration at work (in fact, three days after my actual birthday).
The second highest number of likes was on a photo with my half-first-cousin-twice-removed:
And the third highest number of likes was on a virtue-signalling post about getting vaccinated.
The second highest number of comments was on a post about trans people in sports, which unfortunately turned very nasty; I was disappointed in a number of people who contributed to it, and won’t link from here.
The third highest number of comments was on a post commemorating another calendar milestone, when I turned 20,000 days old.
In previous years I was able to state for certain what Facebook posts of mine had been shared most. This year I note that the following were shared three times, but I am not sure if that was the most. One is about my family connection with the death of Rasputin, one about rescuing your data from Twitter.
And as for Twitter; well. I used to be able to extract all kinds of information about what sort of content had worked well. But they have now restricted that data to posts published in the last ten months, which is not much use if you want to do a twelve month retrospective. At least we can still check engagements and impressions from the Twitter Analytics page, from which it is clear that my top tweets in general were during and after the May 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections. The tweet with the most impressions was this:
And the tweet with the most engagements – people disputing whether particular groups or individuals could be counted as Nationalists or Unionists – was this:
I remain an occasional visitor to Instagram. As with Facebook, my top post of the year related to my birthday.
And as with Twitter, my second most successful post was related to the Assembly elections, a week later.
My third best post by likes was the same COVID-related virtue signalling that did well on Facebook:
The Instagram video with most plays was a little bit of art for Ascension Day brought home from school by U, here put into action by her mother:
LinkedIn is getting better at showing how successful your posts are. You can easily see how many impressions and likes you have received. My top post by impressions was a job advertisement (which gives you an idea of how the algorithm works):
My top post (again by impressions) with content by me was a Guardian piece that quoted me:
And my top post by likes was a piece on this month’s elections in Tunisia – in which I totally failed to foresee the main headline, that the turnout was so pathetically low as to cast the credibility of the whole process into question.
One of the many advantages of having moved this blog from Livejournal to WordPress is that I now have much more satisfactory statistics for user engagement. So the three top posts on here since I moved in March are, in third place:
In second place (now updated with the actual results):
And in first place, by a long long way:
See you next year!
I’m guessing it’s a bit early for you to be declaring top Mastodon posts? Maybe next year, when you have a full 12 months of data!
Yeah, less than a month in and only a couple of days after I changed servers! And I am not sure how easy it would be to get the data anyway…