Good evening, and how are we all today?
It's 8.30 Sunday evening and I'm staring at an almost cloudless blue sky as I contemplate this weeks post. The light evenings have caught me off guard this week, resulting in me being at my desk much longer than anticipated on several occasions. On the plus side this has led to several great editing sessions, on the plus, plus side, it's half term, so I caught up on my sleep in the mornings.
So, I promised you the results of my little experiment on Twitter over the past week. As you'll remember, I stopped adding links to my posts to see if it increased engagement, testing the theory that posts without links are favoured by the Twitter algorithm. The results for the week would seem to prove that they are.
There was a definite uptick in the number of people seeing my posts. Some posts got more likes and shares than similar posts with links as well. It could also be argued that a fair percentage of these people visited my pinned tweet, I also grew my follower numbers quite considerably over the past week, breaking 4000.
What is less positive is the initial effect this has had on my Vocal reads. I have only had one new read all week. Now, it could be that the people that have seen the posts have already read my stuff (I've posted nothing new this week). It could also be that those that may have been interested didn't want to complete the extra step of going to my profile to find the link.
So basically I'm none the wiser, and the experiment was also skewed by the fact that I was pretty much absent from Twitter for the last part of the week as I had other more pressing things on my mind.
So, what can I take away from this?
Tweets with no links have a greater reach
Engagement is about more than numbers
Interaction only comes with content people are interested in
I need to get more creative to get people to my links
I still haven't really got a clue about many things including marketing myself
Most importantly though, I learned that having a day or two off of Twitter is not the end of the world. If you have followers who enjoy your content, they will not forget you because they don't see you for 48hrs. Ok, you might have to work a bit harder to ensure they see you when you come back, but that's no different to reaching out to people you haven't spoken to for a while in real life.
In other news. Bathed in the Blood of Ravens is an awesome read. I'm around halfway through and I highly recommend checking out when it hits Amazon on June 25th.
Work continues on Scourge of the Demon Hunters and three more chapters winged their way to my editor/beta/proofreader this week. My plan is still to have a completed first draft by the end of the summer.
You can help me achieve this goal in several ways. Head over to my Vocal page https://vocal.media/authors/cathylouise-ablett and check out my poetry, non-fiction and excerpts from the book. Every read helps, it really does.
Alternatively, use this link https://vocal.media/vocal-plus?via=catherine-ablett to check out Vocal for yourself and see some of the other amazing creators that are there. If you use this link to sign up that helps too.
Finally, you could always Buy Me a Coffee, help fuel the creativity for another week and get me a step closer to the new desk chair I desperately need. As always thanks for reading and I'll see you next week.