Tag Archives: social media

Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc revisited

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A year ago I posted about my use of the various social media platforms on offer these days (a follow-up from this post in September 2023). A quiet weekend and perhaps time to re-examine what I’m doing on these various channels.

First off, I have pretty much dropped off WeChat over the course of the year. My mornings are bleary-eyed enough without also thinking about posting last night’s blog post to a new audience, and I wasn’t really getting much traction. My 122 WeChat friends, I love you all (well, apart from you obviously) but I’m a very occasional visitor these days.

Bluesky (2.6k followers, 1.6k following) is the clear winner for me of the current microblogging platforms. There has been a massive shift towards it from both sf fans and Irish/EU political commentators, which are two of my core areas of interest, and I seem to have featured in a few ‘starter packs’ so my follower count has rocketed over the last few weeks. I’m definitely getting more engagement there than on any of the others right now. It’s also rather easy to block or mute people you really don’t want to engage with, whereas Twitter/X has made that more difficult. My one big complaint is that there isn’t yet a good way to auto-post from WordPress to Bluesky, whereas all the others make it easy. There is a simple auto-poster, but it posts only your featured image and the title of the post and summary as a caption to that image; it’s not very flexible though it does work.

X/Twitter (8,059 followers, 5,044 following) is still a place where I need to be keeping an eye on things, because the American commentariat has not yet made the jump to elsewhere. I’m doing a series of meetings next week with half a dozen US foreign policy specialists, and some Europeans who are in that area too; all of them still have X/Twitter accounts, most of them fairly active. I think the day will come when Elon loses that community also; for now I’m monitoring but not really engaging, and in return the engagement rate on my posts has dropped off a cliff – usually 200 views if I am lucky, which is 0.25% of the accounts who theoretically follow mine.

Mastodon (780 followers, 673 following) is a bit too much like hard work, the Linux of the microblogging world. As I have commented before, it’s almost impossible to find new and interesting content; you have to hope that you sample the content firehose at the right moment and see the good stuff as it passes by. (And when I have brought this up before, Mastodon advocates tell me proudly that it’s deliberately designed that way.) I did get a massive take-up there of the IKEA product name meme last weekend, but I think I had a couple of strategic boosters working to my advantage.

Threads (526 followers, 909 following) is also low on my list for continued engagement. The thing I really hate is that the default display is the algorithmically chosen feed; while that’s not as bad as it once was (there was a time when I was being shown exclusively content about illness, bereavement and divorce) I still want to see the stuff chosen by me rather than by the computer. There are a few people who I follow there who are not on other platforms, but otherwise I’m at the X/Twitter stage of monitoring without much enthusiasm.

Instagram (1324 followers, 2908 following) remains a fun place to post fun pictures. I like the fact that it crossposts to Facebook and Threads. I don’t expect much more from it. I have a mini-project of posting interesting art on Thursdays, which I usually then share on other platforms as well.

Facebook (4898 friends, another couple of hundred followers) remains a place where I catch up with my extended community, sometimes at greater length. The algorithm is getting worse though, and more variable. Too often I find myself logging on and scrolling through advertisements and community clickbait in order to reach actual content from actual friends. (And when I say ‘too often’, I mean ‘once or twice a week’, which is once or twice too many.) And sorry, no, I am not going to watch yet another video.

Finally, LinkedIn (7626 connections, also many more followers) is becoming more and more of a professional necessity, which is astonishing given that it is the oldest of the lot. (LinkedIn dates from 2003 – compare Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, Instagram 2010, WeChat 2011, Mastodon 2016, Bluesky 2019, Threads 2023.) It is the one platform which has managed to shift user behaviour to a different sort of content production. Granted, a lot of it is “what a fantastic job I have working for such a fantastic company”, but I’d rather have relentless (if insincere) positivity than relentless (and impassioned negativity. And I find it useful for other purposes.

So, as I said last year, LinkedIn is the surprise winner so far of the decline of Twitter, as far as I am concerned; though Bluesky is chasing hard, and as soon as the American commentariat realise that they can switch platforms, the final collapse will happen.

As for the future of this blog: I am looking with interest at the various paid models. My most important audience here is myself, but I do miss the glory days of Livejournal when I could have dozens of comments on an interesting post. Maybe those days are gone, whatever the platform; but I miss them.

Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, etc

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Update from my previous thoughts:

Threads, the new platform offered by Meta as a rival to Twitter, is now open to these of us in the EU, so I have signed on. Slightly odd to find that I already had 199 followers from the get-go. Very disturbing that the default view on the iOs app is not the accounts you are following but those that the app selects “For You”, which had content that I’m not really in the habit of seeking out routinely. Anyway, I sorted that out, and it now seems much the same as the others to be honest.

So for now I’m going to largely post the same content across Threads, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and sometimes Facebook. Photo-led content will go on Instagram and Facebook first and then probably on the others. Professionally relevant stuff goes on LinkedIn, which is becoming increasingly important as a marketplace of ideas.

Also, when I wake up in the morning I try to remember to post last night’s blog to WeChat, for my 98 followers there, most of whom are asleep by the time I post most of my content. (If you want to add me there, go ahead.)

In a few months I will reassess and see which of them I find worth the effort. To be honest, if I were to drop out of just one of them right now, it would be Mastodon. As previously noted, I can’t find the conversations there that I might like to be in, and in addition, the app on iOs is clunky – rather slow to show me my updated timeline, doesn’t like uploading photos, crashes far too often. Mastodon’s advocates will earnestly assure me that it has been designed that way for Reasons, or that I am just Doing It Wrong. They have a right to their own opinions, but I work the way I do for Reasons too.

My top social media and blog posts of the year

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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:

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1522630242308956161

And the tweet with the most engagements – people disputing whether particular groups or individuals could be counted as Nationalists or Unionists – was this:

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1522654308646412288

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:

My daughter and the king

In second place (now updated with the actual results):

Northern Ireland Assembly elections 2022: a preview

And in first place, by a long long way:

Irish surname maps

See you next year!