Social Media
Yesterday I started updating my WordPress blog, because I plan to use it and social media to compare data for the same articles.
Yesterday’s social media post had 32 reads, one like, and one comment. The same content was published to the blog, which actually uses an RSS feed for a forum, so it also gets reads in a short time. Without RSS aggregation, it wouldn’t get reads or indexing for at least a week. For example, this blog post won’t get clicks after publishing because search engines won’t include it, so there will be no traffic.
Here’s a problem: I just downloaded the WordPress mobile app, but I found that I can’t see the read data for individual articles. This plugin can only be viewed in the desktop backend. I just checked, and there are 24 views. So the data is out. Social media has 35 reads, WordPress blog has 24 reads; the difference is not significant. As for this blog post, it’s basically 0 reads.
From the results, social media has the biggest advantage because it gets traffic immediately upon publishing, and its ad revenue is automatically integrated, without needing to apply for Google Ads or set them up manually. It naturally comes with comments, likes, shares, and appreciation features. My two blogs don’t have these, and I’m too lazy to set them up.
The only downside to social media is that sensitive content cannot be written, and it can be seen by relatives and friends, leading to a lack of privacy. However, with an independent blog, I can write whatever I want: about life, making money, politics, etc. I also don’t have to worry about relatives and friends seeing an independent blog, because they don’t use search engines at all. Especially if I write in a different language, let alone them, even I wouldn’t know it was written by me when I read it, providing natural isolation.
Next, I want to test the long-tail traffic of both platforms. I’ve long known that social media always encourages new content; newly published content gets initial traffic, but content published more than a day ago generally gets little traffic unless it has some unique characteristic. In contrast, the advantage of search engines is that there might be little traffic at first, but after data testing and ranking, there could be a continuous stream of long-tail traffic, which won’t be deliberately frozen or hidden.
So I want both, precisely for testing. Whichever performs better, I’ll use more.