Online Writers and Twitter Users: Do You Pay Attention To Your Analytics?

LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

As the saying goes, "Life is for learning." They also say "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

That second statement is bunk. If you embrace the concept of lifelong learning, you'll continuously be looking for new tricks to learn. It becomes your nature.

I've been paying attention to my blogger stats since I started blogging in 2007. Before that I noted my website stats. Having had a career in advertising, I was continuously paying attention to statistics pertaining to lead generation, conversion rates, and the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Maybe that was all fun to me because I like numbers and was always good at math while growing up. Or maybe it was fun because I grew up being a bit competitive and I liked winning. This evolved to what I hope is a healthier motivation to achieve for achievement sake and not to beat anyone.  I don't feel a need to be the best, only to be better than I was.

ALL THIS TO SAY that I learned something new today. 

I've been on Twitter since 2008 when I learned that large numbers of journalists used Twitter for a variety of reasons, including finding breaking news. It's a great way to stay in tune with what is happening on the national and global scenes. And to catch a sense of where others are at on issues, etc. But it's also a great way to share your own stories, articles, ideas and interests. Especially if you're a writer.

What I discovered today is that just as I have access to extensive stats pertaining to my blog (including where my readers are from, what kinds of devices they access the blog from, etc.) there is also a "back room" on Twitter for every Twitter user's analytics. I never knew this.

So, what did I see when I peeked behind the curtain?

Napping on the couch my son's dog Noodles also sleeping.

The Top Interest among my followers is Dogs. 
How interesting because I seldom write about dogs, though there are clues from time to time that I am a dog person.

The Top Language is English.
No surprise there.

Top Lifestyle Type is Online Buyers.
This is strange on one level. I'm still a big advocate for Buy Local, but I get it, I suppose. Maybe.

When it comes to Consumer Behavior, my followers tend to buy Premium Brands. Hmmm.

Mobile Footprint.
Verizon. There was a tie in this category with AT&T. I myself use Verizon as my mobile carrier, though I can't imagine this having a bearing on my Twitter stats.

Then Twitter does a break-out on the Interests into a more detailed set of graphs, and this becomes surprising because I write so much about writing and art that you would think those interests would dominate. Instead, the list of interests most shared with followers is as follows:
Dogs. Weather. Music festivals & concerts. Technology, Education News and general info, Government, Commentary, Tech News, Politics.

At this point I realize that although I Tweet what I blog about each day, I also re-Tweet stories and hit the "Like" button a lot. This means that I've been telegraphing my other interests even when I do not write about them on my blog.

Very interesting.

At the top of your analytics page you can see how many times you've Tweeted in the past 28 days, how many impressions were made, how many profile visits occurred (up 64% this month), how many mentions, and how many followers you now have compared to a month ago.

STILL MORE DATA
If you want to go deeper, you may. My TOP TWEET this month, based on Impressions was a Tweet about my interview with Medium writer/ publisher Nicole Akers. 
You can also find your Top Mention and Top Follower, as well as Top Media Tweet for each and every month going back as far as you want to go. My Top Media Tweet for November was about my interview with author Paul Thomas Chamberlin, author of The Cold War's Killing Fields.

* * * *

Well, it's time to break off here and start my day. Twitter has been an interesting experience and is my favorite social media platform besides blogging. It's easy, and has an international reach that is significant. Facebook feels more like a necessary evil. It's useful for staying in touch with your local tribe, and friends at a distance, but it's become a clutterer space where the platform seems keep pushing things at you and you have to swat them aside all the time.

In recent years Quora and Medium became platforms I enjoyed more. Each seems to be a home for writers. Anyone who is writing I consider to be part of my extended family. Are you a writer? Write on!

* * * *
This blog post was stimulated by an article at Social Media Today titled How to Get More Twitter Followers (Without Spending a Dime)

My 8 Most-Read Stories On Medium This Past Week

Reminder: Easter is just around the corner.

Yesterday I hit 1.9 million pageviews here at Ennyman's Territory. Thank you for all who read, who comment and who share.

This past year I began posting on Medium as well. It's a very clean platform for bloggers, and seems to serve a high caliber writing community. There's much to like about it.

Medium founder Ev Williams was also the co-founder of Blogger and Twitter. The site is intuitive and, like every good blogging platform ought, it has stats and other tools to help you reach an audience.

Each week they send out an email with one's most-most read stories.
Here are links to my most read stories at Medium this past week:  

An Insight About Basic Article Structure That Can Help Your Readers

The Birth of Both Sci Fi and SFX: A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès

Is There a Relationship Between Suffering and Achievement

This Day In History: March 31 Happenings

Ethics and Advertising

Witch Hunts: Then and Now

21 Questions: Dylan Fest Trivia 2019

A Visit With Amateur Futurist and Instant Millionaire Eric Martin

Meantime, have a rewarding Saturday. 

May you enjoy something good and unexpected. 

Navigating the Cyber Seas with Skipper Ev Williams on the Good Ship Medium

I think writers should work for readers instead of advertisers, so I’m voting with my credit card. I happily pay for products I love. Writing is no exception. ~ Andrew Courter

Ev Williams may not be the household name that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are, yet, but he's made an impact that touches households wherever there is Internet access and electricity. Born in '72, he's still just getting started, but look what this Nebraska farm boy has thus far accomplished.

He began his career in the marketing wing of the tech publisher O'Reilly Media and eventually got into writing computer code. While still in his 20s he co-founded a company called Pyra Labs to make project management software. One of the by-products was Blogger, one of the first apps for creating blogs, which was eventually sold to Google for a tidy little sum in 2003. (Ennyman's Territory was born four years later in 2007.) Williams was just 31 when he was getting recognition as a somebody to watch by MIT Technology Review and PC Magazine.

In 2007, around the time I began blogging Williams co-founded Twitter, which I began using a year later. The app was very powerful and candidate Obama was very quick to explore its capabilities. Eight years later another candidate exploited its power to effectively bypass a hostile media and speak directly to his fan/followers.

The entrepreneur's current passion is a new platform called Medium, a community of readers and writers that is intentionally ad-free. Though his vision for this new space has been criticized by some, it's apparent that Medium is being widely embraced by others.

In a NYTimes article titled "The Internet Is Broken": @Ev Is Trying To Salvage It, Mr. Williams elaborates on what he is trying to do on Medium. It's Utopian and another interesting experiment. Trying to create a community without the corrosive effects of advertising does not mean it has not shortcomings. In theory it's supposed to be better writing, better content, without the distractions of marketers. And yet, how can everyone be above average?

When I discovered Blogger I immediately recognized its power, and appreciated its ease of use. Twitter, though an entirely different user experience, likewise opened new possibilities of social interaction. Many of the great thinkers of our age have Twitter accounts and share with us what is on their minds.

Medium is like a separate universe. Or maybe a separate galaxy within the cyber-universe. It's less clear how to best utilize its capabilities, but I'm making an attempt to see how it works. There are purportedly 30 million monthly visitors, and based on the publication readerships a vast quantity of these are loyal readers and dedicated writers.

FWIW, @Ev is Ev Willams' Twitter handle and you can follow him here.

Related Links
The Battle for the Soul of Advertising Will Affect Everything
Ev Williams Explains the Medium Model

Everything Is Broken

Meantime life goes on all around you. Get into it.

I Agree with James Gleick: Let Twitter Be Twitter

This week I finished James Gleick's impressive volume The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Impressively researched, at times tedious, repeatedly stimulating, remarkably rich, the book covers everything from the bits and bytes of information that make up this page to the bits that make us who we are (the information contained in our genetic code.) Isn't that interesting? Yesterday when I checked in on the Duluth Quantum Computing Project a good portion of our discussion had to do with writing code... as in computer code. When did the word "code" get used to describe our genetic make-up? Code is just another word for information. Our entire being is comprised of bits of information that define us in a multitude of ways.

Gleick has compiled a narrative that is strikingly unexpected in the various storylines he weaves, from the talking drums of Africa to Turing's code-breaking and the development of communication technologies from Morse code to telephones, the ENIAC and email.

So it was fun to discover that James Gleick the writer is also a blogger and has a residence on Twitter. The title of his blog embodies the essence of his work: Bits in the Ether. What immediately caught my eye was a post he'd shared that was originally an article in New York Magazine titled Let Twitter Be Twitter.

The piece caught my eye because I've been seeing too many articles lately disparaging Twitter for not being bigger or more profitable or whatever. As a result these meddlers, I mean pundits, keep recommending fixes when there is nothing broken. The people who use it and love it like it just the way it is, thank you.  The article by Mr. Gleick does an excellent job of detailing his own arguments for leaving well enough alone.

I had been planning to write a response to these Twitter hecklers, but found Mr. Gleick's piece completely sufficient, so I decided instead to point you there.

* * * *
As for his book Information, it was selected by Amazon as the book of the month when it came out in 2011. Ira Laefsky, one of the reviewers at the site, wrote this about it:

James Gleick, a prominent journalist, biographer of scientists and explainer of physics has usefully turned his attention to the single most important phenomena of the twenty-first century, the study and quantification of information. This book explains, provides a historical context and gives biographies of the most important explorers of information phenomena throughout the centuries. Gleick provides biographical sketches of lesser known figures in the history of information such as Robert Caudrey compiler of the first known English dictionary and John F. Carrington chronicler of "The Talking Drums of Africa"; he (Gleick) gives fuller personal histories of Samuel F. Morse, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace; Gleick reserves the most extensive biographical treatment for those who "mathematized" the phenomena of information: Claude Shannon and Alan Turing.

In short, for an educational entertaining read, I recommend it.

* * * *
As for Twitter: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

People should try to figure out why a thing works before they try to make it "better." Look what happened to Nascar when their marketing wizards decided to go after the City cats.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. And when the mood strikes, tweet about it. 

Web 2.0

At some point in the last year or so I began noticing a new buzz word in business periodicals and other places. Web 2.0

What's that all about, I wondered. The history of the human race seems to involve people naming things, from Adam on down to the present day. Planets, technologies, species of plants and viruses of all kinds began as unnamed entities at one time. The lands we inhabit had no maps or names. Even our own names were once simple. Leif, son of Eric. William, son of Kyle. (As opposed to Mary Kantor-Carpenter.)

So, when a new buzz word emerges, I often ask if it is a real thing that needed naming, or simply a namer seeking to make a name for him or herself by being first to identify and label something truly new.

Well, Web 2.0 is useful and does indeed describe how the internet has evolved. The best way to understand Web 2.0 is to compare the interactive blogger world to the more old fashioned websites that were essentially posted for viewing. For example, compare how you get around on my personal website at http://www.enewman.biz/ with Twitter and Blogger and MySpace. Yep, there seems to be enough difference to call it a new generation of webwork. I created my personal site in '94/'95 using Adobe PageMill and HTML. Today, there's a whole host of tools, gizmos and widgets for developing your modern virtual landscape.

YouTube is another of the new communities of Web 2.0... For entertainment, nothing beats it right now. Comedy sites online are bombing while comedy and humor on YouTube is burgeoning. (Speaking of bombing, the Unabomber Ted Kacynski would probably never have had to go to the New York Times if he'd had access to an audience through the internet like today.)

YouTube is also a practical tool with businesses putting training videos online to not only tell how to do things, but show it as well. I just replaced a toilet this weekend using a half dozen YouTube toilet installation how-to vids, each not more than three minutes in length, produced by people as diverse as a Brit plumber and the Home Depot.

RSS feeds, Atom and Feedburner enable new content to be delivered directly to inboxes when properly configured. On and off switches, re-directs, blog posting via cell phones... it's all evolving for sure. There is even a virtual world called Second Life where you can create a character and live, go to malls, preach on street corners, whatever. I once read that Hillary went there (as a virtual Hillary) as part of her campaign efforts.

I took an interest in blogging from two directions. First, in order to understand the marketing potential of social media as part of what I do for a living. But second, I am an artist and creative person and like stand up comics and public speakers, most artists and writers produce not for an empty room but for an audience.

If you're really interested in understanding the new media, the emerging arena of evolving cyberspace, the best thing is to learn by doing. When you hear about podcasting, try it. When you read about blogging, see what it's about by doing it. Maybe you can start at the library or a book store and fetch a good book to help with initial decisions (like costs and where to plant your space) but in general, the web itself has more answers than you can shake a stick at.

Be sure to watch the new generation of young professionals who have grown up on all this stuff. For example, Desarae Veit is a Twin Cities Web professional seeking to maximize the power of social media for companies moving into Web 2.0 and co-founder of a new Wiki called Sniki.org. Follow her connections, and they lead to more connections. Find the right guide and you can move fast though the hoops and over the hurdles. (Meet Desarae here)

These are all uncharted seas, to be sure. And as noted in another post businesses have not necessarily figured out how to take advantage of the commercial aspects of it. But hasn't that been the philosophy of the internet from the beginning? Pre-world wide web there was still an internet, and it was not populated by Neanderthals. These social parts of the internet have proven vital in an increasingly high tech world. You Digg?

Thus spake ennyman.