In past years I’ve done a roundup of my best performing posts on social media and on my blog. This year I’m skipping almost all of my social media analysis, because Twitter/X’s analytics are broken (a real shame after years of providing interesting information, but it’s in catastrophic decline anyway) and Facebook seems also to have made it much more difficult to scrape useful data off the system. There seems to be no analytical capability for Bluesky at all, and I’ve not been on Threads for long enough for it to count. Thanks to MastoMetrics, I can give you my most liked post on Mastodon of the year:
And LinkedIn, where I could be more active perhaps, also tells me which post has gained the most impressions:
But what you lose on the swings, you may gain on the roundabouts, and WordPress has given me a very good summary of the performance of my blog posts here over the last year. These are the top ten.
10) William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline
Even though most of this blog consists of book reviews, this is the only book review in the top ten. Published in April, it had a surge of interest from August on, with a peak in mid-November. I assumer that someone put it on a university curriculum reading list, and it was then picked up by Wordsworth fans.
9) Social media in the age of Mastodon and Bluesky
This was my response to a friend’s query about social media after the decline of Twitter. He linked it from his blog, and we both linked to it from LinkedIn, which made a big difference. My top LinkedIn post of the year was my link to his blog post about it, probably because I tagged the other people mentioned.
One of several Hugo / WorldCon posts in the top ten, this got some traction among people who care about this sort of thing. NB that the vote for “No Award” in the Best Series category this year was higher by far than for any other.
I think that both of these posts were boosted in China in places I can’t see, as well as by Westerners wanting to see what had happened at WorldCon. My two other WorldCon posts were both in the top twenty.
My analysis of the resolutions up for a vote at the WSFS Business Meeting in Chengdu. As it turned out I did not attend much of the proceedings myself, but this may have been the only detailed look at the agenda pre-meeting that was widely available.
After some reflection, I boosted this on LinkedIn as well as the usual sources, and got a lot more views as a result. My link to it was my second-best performing LinkedIn post of the year. Also, cute pictures.
At a point when some really outrageous things were being said about the 2023 Hugo ballot, this was my attempt to inject some sanity into the process. I suspect that the article was widely shared on Discords etc that I am not in.
1) What to expect in 2023, according to science fiction
Literally my first post of the year, with 600 views, 530 of them in January. Also featured on File 770, and maybe elsewhere. Somehow I caught the Zeitgeist. Will try and do another for Monday week.
So, I’ve learned two things from this. First, even though I put most effort into the book reviews here, it’s not what my public are especially reading. That doesn’t matter hugely, because in the end the primary target readership for my book reviews archive is myself in future years. Second, LinkedIn makes a heck of a difference. I posted very few of the above to LinkedIn – Gallifrey at #3 and social media at #9 – but it’s noticeable that substantial commentary pieces there do resonate, so I will be trying to cross-post there more often next year.
