Social Media & Blog Stats; September 2017.
Social Media Statistics - September 2017.
It's that time of the month where I look back at the thirty odd days past and see what statistics my blog and social media have thrown up. I always pretty much know what kind of a month I'm having mid month and September was no exception - basically I knew within about 12 days that it was going hideously.
It's my lowest stats month in a while (maybe since last year) and I could just see it and I won't spoil the actual stats but it's lower than normal. The problem with me is once I see something is stalling I basically give up on it for that month? My Pinterest is dropping? I don't pin for a fortnight. My Twitter following hasn't risen quite like normal? I don't do a single chat. My blog is trailing off every day? I don't promo tweet. I basically just forget about it and I'm like well that's a lost cause and I move on to next month.
This time round I'm really going to make an effort, I'm going to look at my stats every few days and when I can see a trend that's slowing down a bit I'm going to make an effort on that platform to gee it up and if I see a good trend I'm going to focus and capitalise on it! In theory anyway.....
Instagram;
Instagram is a funny old beast isn't it? Last month I was shadowbanned for a few days which kept my Insta stats very stale at around 1080 which I've been somewhere near for a while now. This month I very quickly gained followers after a few mentions in FF threads which are always gold for new followers and I have been floating around the 1100 mark all month, constantly dipping to 1099 and back up again. As we stand I'm on 1107 and whilst I don't expect that to massively jump in October cos lol algorithm I am actually really loving Instagram at the moment.
After a thread by blog wizard Hannah Gale I have started changing up the way I use Insta. She mentioned that whilst we all bitch about the lack of following growth we have, how many of us actually follow new accounts? We used to follow thousands of accounts, follow everyone that followed us, follow everyone we'd ever heard of but these days we're much more picky about who we follow and how many accounts. The algorithm makes it difficult enough to see people we DO like on our feeds so do we really want to clog it up with new people? I even had an Instagram cull in the recent months let alone follow new people?
So with Hannah's words ringing in my ears I started following new people when my favourite accounts did follow threads. Think Queen Beady, Sea Tea Me etc...whenever people I already love did follow threads I would look at the accounts they recommended and then give them a follow. I've probably followed around 30 in the last fortnight and whilst not loads, they're all people I really really like and I probably followed 30 in 6 months before that. I'm going to do a massive follow thread when I have the time of all the new people I've found but if you can change your attitude to Instagram I suggest you do - and fall in love with the platform again.
Twitter;
Last month I mentioned that I had a whacking great cull of my Twitter following because of all the spam accounts and creepy men I had following me and lost around 500 followers. It was a bit of a pisser because I was so close to 4K but it had to be done so this month I am back up to 3526 which is less than 100 new followers but it's something.
I did one Late Night Bloggers chat this month which was ace and I am desperate to take more on this month because it does wonders for my engagement but I either forget or don't have the time to commit to a busy chat for an hour. Like I said above, I start each month with a conscious effort to buffer loads of tweets and what not but as always it fell apart mid month and then when my blog stats were falling off the face of the earth I did much better but there we go.
I tweeted less this month, around 630 times (down from 800 odd) and my impressions were down 15K to 109K. My profile visits were down again but are still healthy at over 2000 but lack of chats and lack of tweets means my mentions are down too, round about 360 this month. In the end I actually only ended up with 55 new followers, despite apparently lots every day so it looks like I lost a few followers too which due my inactivity and people on a spat of culls isn't overly surprising.
My most popular tweet this month was this corker;
Pinterest;
Pinterest this month has been very much a tale of two halves. I started the month doing very little on it and I ended the month having massive binges on it every day - it's basically how my relationship goes with Pinterest on the regular. Mid month I reorganised my boards on a whim, adding new board covers that all fit together like an Instagram theme and bringing them into an order I was happy with and it made me fall in love with Pinterest all over again.
I've been pinning a LOT. Lots and lots of Autumnal stuff and also I had a big binge of Hannah's Pinterest because it's very much my aesthetic and just generally have been really enjoying Pinterest again. I had 3444 followers at the end of August and I ended September with 3530 so not quite a gain of 100 per month which is a little less than normal. My impressions this month also went down from around 1.4 million to 1.2 at 1,266,024 which ain't half bad I appreciate.
Bloglovin;
Like I've mentioned before I don't put a lot of effort at all into Bloglovin. I've never seen much growth from it and I've never seen any advice on how to grow it other than follow people and they'll follow you back which for me, totally defeats the object. That being said this month I have followed some people, particularly people involved in The Blog Race that I wasn't already following and the people Naomi recommended in this post and my own following has gone from 570 to 583.
Google Analytics;
So I eluded to this at the beginning of this post but I've had my lowest pageviews stats since June 2016 which I said for August too but it's got lower again this time. I mentioned last month that my viral pins on Pinterest generate a lot of views to my blog daily and when these pins aren't as popular my stats drop and this seems to be the same this month.
This month I had 20,645 pageviews from 11,000 viewers which whilst about 10K lower than my normal views of the past year, I'm still finding a lot of it encouraging. Because a lot of traffic is sent via my Pinterest my bounce rate has been quite high and that drops every month which is good and also the amount of people vs pageviews - showing that my readers are coming back time and time again. My DA has also gone up another point to 27 which is tip top.
So apart from Bloglovin (which idk what it's doing) everything else has dropped in stats but overall there's a lot of it I feel pleased with? I'm definitely happier with how my Instagram is looking swish, my Pinterest is super inspiring to me at the mo and my bounce rate and DA are going in the right track too. Let's hope October is kind to me!
