Anime Blog Shop Talk

Is Social Media Worth the Effort?

Conventional Wisdom’s Answer to Is Social Media Worth the Effort

Is social media worth the effort? I see that many of you follow the same advice I followed: I posted links to each of my new posts on the major social media platforms, including Blusky, Facebook, Mastodon/sakurajima.moe, Pinterest, and Twitter. Given the ruckus over many of those services, I thought it might be a good idea to take a step and ask: is that advice still good?

I’m not approaching the question from an ideological perspective. I’m asking as a blogger who wants to connect my material to readers. We can talk about the merits and pitfalls of what Twitter has become, and there’s value in those discussions. It’s just not the conversation I want to have now.

My basic question is this: is the effort to post to social media worth it?

Background and Facts

Let’s start with some basic facts. I used to post seven days a week. I’ve cut back to four-ish. That has driven down my traffic. There’s also an industry-wide reduction in blog traffic as writers and readers go to YouTube or other platforms. Some of the numbers I’m about to share will reflect that reduction.

Here’re my total Views for the last few years, according to Jetpack:

  • 2021: 306,895
  • 2022: 177,365
  • 2023: 196,043
  • 2024 (so far): 64,468

Cutting back from seven to four really hit me this year. That’s fine. I was never in this for popularity. But that’s beside the point (my ego forced me to mention that). The point is those numbers set the context.

Here are the incoming clicks from the main social media platforms. I didn’t include Bluesky because I only joined it recently:

Search EnginesFacebookMastodonPinterestTwitter
2021196,2907320450645
2022122,62433501,454577
2023134,72158901,506313
202432,7784130355335

I just noticed that my Pinterest numbers really tanked in 2024. That makes sense. I used to pin all of my review graphics as I published reviews, and those graphics are (obviously) what drives Pinterest traffic.

Can you tell when I switched from 7 to 4 posts a week?

If you compare the social media counts, with the exception of the cliff my Pinterest numbers fell off of in 2024, Pinterest it the top performer, with Facebook and Twitter relatively close. But I want to make an observation here: Facebook and Twitter accounted for about one click per day. One click. 

Look at this another way. Search traffic in 2021 accounted for about 64% of my traffic. Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter combined accounted for about 0.6%. In 2024, search traffic accounted for 51% of my traffic, whereas social media (again, combined), accounted for 1.7%.

You could say that social media is more important than ever! Or you could say that it’s still less than 2%.

But What About Engagement?

Doesn’t engagement on social media count? Doesn’t it help my site beyond what the basic numbers show?

I get that the conventional wisdom is that engagement’s important, and I agree. I just don’t agree that it helps my blog if engagement is over on social media. Engagement on social media helps that platform. I have nothing against that. But the attitude on some sites (and I’m guessing you know which one in particular I’m talking about) is that we as content creators owe something to the social media platform.

They say that, with a straight face, after we (as content creators) have given these platforms free content for years.

I love engagement –  when it’s on my blog. In fact, I want to go on the record as saying I have some of the best commenters in the anime blog sphere. Not having those on social media reduces the number of eyes that read those comments. But I consider that a blessing. I mean, you’ve read the quality of some comments/feedback, particularly on the sites that are under new management. Those suck the life and joy out of anime fandom, and I’m glad to do my part to disallow those on my site.

If you’ve commented on any of my posts, thanks! I’m glad you take the time to share your thoughts.

So, Is Social Media Worth the Effort?

Before I answer the question, you might ask: “Hey, Crow, what’s making up the difference between 51% and 1/7% in 2024? Good question! I get a trickle of traffic from Aniblogtracker. The rest is from WordPress Reader. I consider it plus search (mostly Google) to be the main drivers.

In these numbers from 2024, you can see that even Google Lens outperforms the social media platforms.

For years, I’ve given social media free content. That’s the content that helps bring people to those sites. And for years, I have not gotten much in return. A little recognition, sure. But nothing substantial. Is 2% traffic worth the time I’ve invested?

No. It’s not. The older I get, the more aware I am that I don’t have infinite time. I’m going to dial back my social media presence. I’m going to probably prefer Facebook, because my writing career really likes Facebook. But for anime, I’m dialing back. The return’s not there.

I have ideological concerns, sure. A ton of them. But speaking as a blogger without infinite time, I can’t justify continued effort to post to social media.

What about You and Your Blog?

Have you looked at this question? If so, what are your plans for your blog? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

tcrow
Copyright 2022 Terrance A. Crow. All rights reserved.
https://www.crowsworldofanime.com

29 thoughts on “Is Social Media Worth the Effort?

  1. When I came online in the early 2000s, I really took to forums. They’re still my favourite medium for conversations to this day. I’ve didn’t have an interest in the newer stuff that was cropping up back then (which back then was pretty much MySpace; I’m surprised to find it’s still around – nobody seems to remember it where I tend to go…). And then, when Twitter came around, I groaned. The very format seemed to me to be a slogan machine. Follow your favourite author and learn when the next book’s coming out, or what interesting article they’ve been reading lately? Sure. Conversations? The threading feature on twitter was a pain to read. You chop up thoughts and at the end of the day you invite… slogan responses.

    I have no idea how social media aside from forums work, but one thing I’ve learned from forums is this: You go somewhere only to advertise, and you turn off the local readership. You go there because it’s a cool place and interact because it’s fun? They check out your profile.

    I imagine, in some pared-down form, that would be true for twitter et al., too. Go there to have fun, get to know people, be genuine… and they’ll care. Go there to leave links? Spam.

    I’ve often wondered if, say, I were a writer and my contract said I’d have to go online on twitter et al. to advertise, what would I do? I’m not a natural for those platforms. I’d probably post mostly memes. In anime terms: “Sailer Moon (picture of famous pose in front of the moon)/Sailor Toon (picture of Popeye the sailor winking”. Or maybe polls: Better Pet? Shoebill with a scarf or Frederick Chopin in a box? (You need to watch Classicaloid to get this). And so on.

    I mean look at how many hits you got from the Drunken Anime Blog; I’m sure your replies in the comment section helped with that. (I’ve never read an anime blog run by a better networker than Irina – it seemed to come natural to her.) Can you create that sort of persona on twitter? If so, twitter will help. If not, forget it. I’m no expert, but that’s what would make sense to me.

    1. I miss forums. Well, a few still thrive, like Stack Overflow. I’ll tell you what I really miss: CompuServe’s SIGs. High density of information; low density of BS. Most of the time, anyway!

      Thinking about your perspective on Twitter, I realized why I was comfortable just posting links to my posts there. I never consider Twitter a serious discussion platform. At best, it was a collection of sound bites with occasional news coverage. But in terms of an actual discussion, pretty much nothing.

      I watched Twitter to see when my favorite bloggers posted, and I’d know to go check out their stories.

      I’m going to have to give that some more thought and see if it changes my decisions about social media.

      I think some of my traffic from Irina’s site was from comments; other were from our collaborations. I miss those. She was great to collaborate with — always on time and always professional. And you’re right about how good she was at networking. I think the talent was natural, but I think she really brought it to fruition with a lot of determination and hard work.

      It’s a talent I utterly lack.

      1. Forums were so useful. The commercial trend for internet is to favor trivial content that vanishes quickly. It’s not worth putting a lot of effort into a fb post, because it will soon be gone forever. I suppose that puts user-generated content that people want to read on a lower level than advertising.

  2. As long as you’ve got an automatic broadcast set up with a good summary, you might as well send things out, though I wouldn’t depend on it to generate much traffic, especially for sites with advertisers and algorithms.
    Back when FB was offering $30 deals on advertising, I sprung for an ad for the local anime club. Went through audience selection- local, age range, interested in anime, movies, cartoons, etc. Came up with criteria where they said it could reach 6k people.
    After it ran, I looked at the data. FB said they showed the ad to about 30 people! Even for things I’m specifically following, they often won’t show me an event until days after it’s taken place.

    At least for Mastodon and other fediverse if you’re following a person or a hashtag it won’t hide it from you.

    1. Ad selection for Facebook ads was always a nightmare. And it’s done nothing but get worse. David Gaughran is an expert in such things, and with his help, I’ve managed to run a few successful FB ads for my novels. But it’s non-trivial.

      Only took me 2 years to start to get it right!

      Good point about the Fediverse and visibility. One of the biggest improvements to the early internet was the “follow” mechanism, which allowed creative folk to develop a following. TikTok directly assaulted that, and now, with FB, Twitter, etc. intentionally hiding posts from people I follow, well — it’s all just part of the equation that makes me want to disengage with social media.

  3. As for Mastodon, since the links put Noreferrer on there, so it’s shows as direct traffic on the stats, so it’s impossible to see where the traffic is coming from without throwing a utm on the URL.

    I have been away from Twitter for close to two years, and there hasn’t been much of a difference traffic wise. I think the thing that really increased the engagement is probably the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. I follow my blog on Mastodon and boost every new posts, and yes, I got a good number of comments out of that since it’s basically easy to comment just by replying to the blog post from Mastodon/Fediverse. Probably should give ActivityPub WordPress plugin a try, I do have instructions somewhere on the forums to set that up, although there are additional steps if you are using caching.

    But yes, it’s hard out there, Search engine traffic has been all over the place as they seem to want to focus on AI.

    I guess it’s time to bring back webrings?

    1. I didn’t know Mastodon put a Noreferrer on its links. That makes it kinda hard for me to quantify its impact!

      I hadn’t heard about ActivityPub — thanks for the suggestion! I’ll take a look.

      You mentioned the search engines’ focus on AI: that worries me. Until now, Google’s goals aligned with mine: Google wanted to be the go-to search engine, so it wanted to send people to sites of interest. I wanted those people to see my posts! Google also sold ads for the results page, so everyone won.

      Now, generative AI scrapes the same pages that Google indexes. Instead of sending traffic to my site, they summarize what I would have said in a generative AI-based summary. I don’t get the traffic, and Google gets a short-term win.

      Thing is, as sites go dark due to lack of traffic, there’s no fodder for the generative AI engine. Goggle and others are cannibalizing their long term profitability for a short term gain. Which makes them just like most modern corporations.

      They can probably survive a downturn. Not sure about the rest of us!

      1. Not to mention, Misskey servers (which are the same as Mastodon as they use ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon) show up as individual websites as well, so it can be hard to gage what is going on.

        Yes, I noticed traffic drop too, and I have even upgraded Yoast to the Pro version for extra options, but we’ll see if I can even recover from the drop.

        We know that the internet is getting worse because of enshittification, I know that the whole WordPress drama is part of the enshittification of WordPress (Yes, I have shared a lot about the WordPress drama on Mastodon, and it’s a s-show), but I’m going to share it in my upcoming post (almost 2 years of not being on Twitter, those years went by quickly).

        As a whole, the whole social network that is really work it is ones not controlled by a corporation, as when VC gets involved, it turns to crap as Social Media in general. Even I don’t even trust BlueSky since recently, besides introducing paid plans, a Crypto VC is now funding it, which I have bad feelings it won’t end well. I don’t have a dedicated account on BlueSky, but just “bridged” my Mastodon account which basically have most of the posts I made on Mastodon.

        But Masodon is my main social network and my follower count already surpassed the small following I had on Twitter (I think the most I got is around 300 and my Mastodon account is a little over 900), although I had to cut a lot of connections I had on Twitter, but the anime community on the Fediverse, while not as big is not too bad.

        Also, I do recommend blogs taking advantage of ActivityPub features in WordPress, it did raise the engagement on my blog, but I have modified the guide with a bunch of tips if anyone is interested in getting their blogs on the Fediverse, which includes Mastodon.

        https://forums.sakurajima.moe/resources/enabling-activitypub-on-wordpress.7/

        But yes, besides my efforts of managing a Mastodon and Misskey community that focuses primarily on Japanese media/culture, I hope more people start blogging again, get onto the Fediverse and perhaps go back to using forums. I don’t think social network sites own by big businesses like Facebook, X (probably in the end stages), Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, etc will last in the long run and face the same Enshittification cycle.

        I only see the Fediverse (despite it’s flaws), blogs, internet forums as the way forward, user run communities, not controlled by a few big corporations. I have used the internet for a long time, despite being born in 1989, I feel the 2000s was the best time to be on the internet. Anything after the early 2010s basically started turning to crap, and now, it’s probably at it’s worse.

        1. Really glad to hear your perspective about Mastodon! Gives me a bit of hope.

          Bluesky reminds me a little of Twitter, back the day — around the time Twitter helped fund Bluesky’s startup (if I remember correctly). But, as you said, it’s controlled by investors, a board, and an executive team. Who could change direction at the drop of a hat.

          I’ll absolutely look into ActivityPub. If it helps with blog engagement _and_ provides content for Mastodon, then it’s a win/win — which is the kind of relationship I’d like.

          My biggest fear about the Fediverse is that without adequate backing, it won’t thrive, even down to the level of maintaining its open source code. The Register had a good writeup about it recently. But I agree that it’s a much better proposition than anything else, right now, at least in terms of folks who want to control/manage their own content.

  4. Here’s a variant on that question. Even if Social Media is not worth the effort… Where is your alternatives?

    Ever since I entered the online field with Comic World News and Comic Book Insider? I asked myself that question. And not once in over 20 years has a satisfactory answer arisen. Not diaries, nor groups like AMINO, or even here at WordPress/Jetpack. Nothing has once arisen to take the place of Social Media as a viable alternative. But maybe one of you have an idea. Please. What is there when Social Media fails you?

    1. Using Yoast to improve my SEO gave me the biggest jump in readers. I hesitated for a long time, because I associated “SEO” with keyword stuffing and other shady practices. But if I instead thought of it as a way to connect interested readers with my material, then it made more sense.

      SEO really boils down to thinking of your topic, using that in headings, and making sure your format works. I wrote about it here:

      https://www.crowsworldofanime.com/posts/four-easy-steps-to-seo-readers-first/

      Depending on what WordPress plan you’re on, the approach should be free or close to it.

      WordPress Reader helps, but Automattic has been raising the price of entry. I mean I get it — Automattic is a business, and businesses need to make money. But — well, my thoughts about Automattic and its founder are a topic for a full post!

      I hope that helps!

  5. I was only getting a few views from Twitter, back when it was Twitter and you could automatically crosspost between Twitter and WordPress, but I think views really started falling off a cliff when I was trying to monetise and it turns out posts weren’t going to the Reader. I never figured out how to fix that, so I undid everything and changed my mindset to be less views-related instead.

    Aside from the Reader, search engines are where it’s been at for me, even before the monetisation switch.

    People tout Pinterest as being a godsend for full-time bloggers (and that doesn’t work for me anyway since most times I don’t put images on my posts), but my research says Pinterest can be volatile due to changing algorithms.

    1. Sorry to hear about your experience with Reader! I wonder if Automattic was throttling based on your plan. They’re doing something similar with stats (making you pay more if you’re trying to monetize, because they want a piece).

      Your experience with Pinterest sounds just like mine! There was a period where I got solid traffic from it — decent engagement in Pinterest comments, too. Those times are long past.

      It feels like there are more and more barriers to blogs like ours trying to monetize; or at least it’s a lot more expensive now.

      I’m grateful search still works. Though Google’s inclusion of generative AI results at the top (which summarizes data from other websites, but doesn’t link to those sites) makes me a bit pessimistic about the future.

  6. Very good numbers. And yeah, the massive dip in traffic shows. I post once or even twice a week and get pittance of views. The grind is really there, inthecubbyhole my old blog still gets good amount of traffic, several years on with no new posts at all, could do with the fact that I posted 10-20 posts a month back then. Urgh, social media is such a hassle for me, trying to grow them is a massive pain, tried building a FB page, someone else who also had roughly started out new, ended up growing faster than me. Converting them in to clicks is even worse. I get the odd small clicks here and there.

    1. I remember trying to grow my Facebook page! Got no traction until I spent a little bit on a boosted post, but even then, it never grew beyond that. It really is a massive pain! In fact, that pain is what prompted me to look into the numbers and write this post.

      I might still post if I have time, but I’m to the point where even thinking about social media is depressing. It doesn’t help that I’ve always hated wasted potential, and that’s pretty much all I see in social these days!

      Heck, even though Threads looked promising for a few months, it’s making some weird decisions lately.

      1. It is an absolute pain, growing a FB page. I mentioned someone else I connected with on FB who is also an anime fan. It took me a while to realise what it is and how they surpassed me in a short space. And this also applies to 9 tailed kitsune and her FB page, which is huge.

        What I realised is, they gave value. Like they didn’t spam their blog links everywhere. The one I connected with, joined plenty of anime groups. Say what you want about this, she generates AI OC anime characters, along with edited clips or reels. And in time grew to over 100 followers with 41 members in her own group.

        However, I’m pretty inconsistent and tend to stumble. Trying to find what value I can give.

        I don’t use threads that often, so that is unfortunate they are making weird decisions

        1. Growing a FB page or group takes the kind of effort you mentioned. It also takes money — for ads. My FB page is 700+ (last I checked). About 90% is the result of a single ad I ran years ago. I noticed that if I didn’t keep running ads, engagement dropped to zero.

          You’re right, I think, when you say that posting links doesn’t encourage on-platform engagement. And that’s cool! I’d prefer engagement on a platform I control, or have some hope of controlling.

          It’s just all become too much of a hassle with too little return. The mindset to optimize each transaction leave no room for give and take. I mean, every time I engage with a social media post, I’m giving that platform free content. I’m not reimbursed, except in that I’m allowed to participate in group discussions.

          I’d prefer to pay my monthly fee to maintain my little blog here.

          Until the WordPress guy decides I’m not paying enough, anyway!

          1. Speaking of ads, I very recently ran ad or blaze on WP for a measly two days. Just to experiment on what’s it like. The estimation for one post for 2 days was around 5-6k impressions, not views, impressions, all countries, aimed at TV and entertainment. I got 10k impressions at the end of it. What matters is clicks

            .. I got 24 clicks in total. That’s 12 clicks per day. Not worth it. By that, someone like yourself can get 12 clicks or more for free by just posting normally.

            Agree, social media is just a hassle, too little return. Or the terminology I like to use, high effort, low rewards.

  7. Wow, seeing your numbers on blog traffic was really eye opening! My blog has sooo much less views. . . . That’s okay (sniff, sniff) I’m not sad about that (sob) not one bit. Lol. I don’t really post on any social media, so maybe that has something to do with my teeny tiny traffic? But looking at your numbers, maybe if I posted on social media it wouldn’t make that much of a difference? I’m not really sure, it’s a tough question. I never really bothered with social media connected to my blog simply because I thought connecting it all up would be too much of a hassle. I have dabbled in making podcasts connected to my blog and Youtube manga reviews, but they never really took off so I eventually stopped because it just took too much time and it wasn’t really very fun either. I blog about anime as a hobby to help me relax and express myself, the Youtube channel and podcasts just made it feel like work.

    1. There were two things that boosted traffic to my site: focusing on SEO (in a good way, not a scammy/scummy way) and Jetpack Professional.

      SEO can be a controversial topic, because so many sites misuse it. But if you think of it as connecting your posts to readers who might like it and come back for more, it’s easier to accept. I wrote a post that might help (and the tools it talks about are free, though I’m not sure what WordPress plan you’re on):

      https://www.crowsworldofanime.com/posts/four-easy-steps-to-seo-readers-first/

      The other was JetPack Professional. It automatically sent my posts to WordPress Reader as I posed, and that increased traffic. Automattic doesn’t have that plan anymore; I think it’s the Security Plan that includes what I needed. It’s like $240 a year, which is quite a lot for a hobbyist. I’m grandfathered in for half that, and it’s still an ouch — for a hobby.

      I think you’re right to keep blogging fun. The SEO stuff should easily fit into your posts, and that should do a lot to increase traffic without making blogging any more difficult.

  8. I’m very much the same with Search Engines driving most of my traffic. After that, it’s direct traffic where people have typed my site into the web browser. Social media accounts for such a small amount that if I hadn’t automated it, I would stop entirely. There is an argument that search engines look at social media as a part of the algorithm so it being there might help your site climb the rankings more than if there wasn’t a social media presence.

    As you mentioned, likes and comments on social media only help your social media presence, but that might introduce a new person to your site who then comes directly going forward. Sadly, there’s no good answer.

    Also, Twitter used to be my best social media account for links followed. That’s now Facebook despite a much smaller following…

    I used to do well with Pinterest, but their bots keep removing pins that aren’t remotely inappropriate so I got fed up with arguing with them.

    1. I’ve had the same issue with Pinterest — and the screen caps I share are very tame!

      I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can take social media into account. It’s hard for me to quantify, because as social media declined in terms of impact, so did my posting schedule. So, of course, search traffic declined somewhat. I could try to figure out the search results per post and extrapolate an impact, but the popularity of whatever show(s) I’m reviewing also have an impact.

      Market analysis is hard!

      1. Yeah, you could easily end up spending all your time trying to work out why one post got a few more views on a particular day when it’s a better use of your time to just write another post.

  9. I ditched Twitter a few months back for the same reasons everyone else has… and have seen absolutely zero impact on either my article view counts or YouTube viewing figures. The importance of social media for promoting stuff that isn’t confined to those platforms is grossly overstated.

    All these social platforms want to keep you *on their platform*. Musk is desperate for Twitter to become “The Everything App”, and for people to want to post all their videos and articles directly on there. Even before he took over, though, there was demonstrable evidence that Twitter’s algorithms were burying tweets with links to off-site articles.

    You’re best off building a community on the platform where your actual work is, be that WordPress, YouTube or whatever. Building that community in the first place can be a challenge, but it’s absolutely doable and eminently worthwhile.

    1. I think your points about Twitter are spot on. Facebook, too, seems to restrict organic reach for posts containing outbound links, for the same reasons you mentioned.

      There’re threats to our building communities wherever we are. YouTube too often de-monetizes or otherwise punishes accounts for even faked copyright infringement reports. There’re even threats to WordPress, which is a topic I’ve been thinking about but haven’t quite gotten my mind around from the perspective of practical impact to bloggers.

      Still, if we keep in mind that we have to be as careful as we can with platform selection, I think you’re right about building community. WordPress’ tools still seem to help with that — mostly.

      1. My big concern with WordPress right now is how hard they’re pushing AI features. They infest *everything* from the post composition tool to the forums, and they’re pushing those features *hard*.

        My personal blog fell foul of their automated (which, these days, I suspect means “AI-powered”) systems a few weeks back. It got incorrectly marked as “spam” for some reason (I have no idea why, I was writing about Fitness Boxing on the Switch!), and WordPress’ response was, rather than reaching out to me to make sure everything was OK, to completely deactivate a blog with 17+ years of posts. This, as you might expect, caused no small degree of panic and ultimately led me to take my personal blog off WordPress.com and make it self-hosted instead.

        On top of that, there’s some legal ugliness between the CEO and WPEngine that is… yeah. Don’t know what to make of all that, and sincerely hope it doesn’t affect this platform we’ve all called “home” for so long.

        I still think WordPress is one of the best blogging tools around and has been for a long time, but I’m concerned they, like many other online services, are falling to “enshittification”. I hope I’m wrong!

        1. I have a post brewing somewhere in my subconscious about what’s going on with Automattic’s founder and WPEngine. It’s ugly, and it bodes nothing good for the future of WordPress.

          The worst part isn’t even what’s happened so far. It’s what Automattic is positioning itself to be. Hint: it’s not being a responsible member of the open source community.

          Very, very sorry to hear about your experience. I’m self hosted, in part to reduce the chances that something like that will happen to me. But that’s an additional level of pain, though the freedom it brings is, I think, worth it.

          But it’s just one more thing to deal with.

          I’m not anti-AI. But I think using AI to write posts defeats the purpose. Using AI to proof read? Sure. Using AI to write content? As an anime fan, why would I want to read AI-generated post about anime? I could just fire up ChatGPT and have it write the post for me. I go to anime sites to read authentic human thoughts and views.

          I’d prefer to see Automattic focus on making Gutenburg more usable (if I have to deal with one more major UI change around Patterns…). Or improving Reader, or coming up with new and innovative ways to build community.

          Or something useful!

          “Enshittification,” indeed!

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