Digressing Down a Rabbit Hole…

Twitterminism

What’s Compelling Your Pen?

Let’s talk about spinning wheels.

I’ve been at this writing thing for a while. I’ve had a few short stories published, I’ve made like $8.03 from the medium partner program. I’m reluctantly active on Twitter with ~2700 followers. I follow the proper Twitter etiquette (Twitiquette?) and follow back.

“Gosh, 2700ish followers? You must get a lot of views/reads!” Quoth the neophyte, uninitiated in the rigors and rituals of the modern writing hustle. Listen, I’m not deluded enough to think that even half my followers, let alone all of them, will read or even view my stories. How about one in five? 20%? 540 loyal fans? Does that seem reasonable?

A Spicy Digression

To demonstrate, picture 90s supergroup “The Spice Girls” — Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary and Sporty Spices — loyal Twitter followers all, see the tweet plugging my latest story on their feeds –

Scary, a fan of frightful tales and witty grammar humor, is intrigued by the title and decides to forestall a night out. Here’s how I picture the scene –

Scary: “OY! You lot get on to the pub without me. I’m going to read this bit by this American bloke Ginger: “You what? Stop faffing around, you daft cow!” Posh: “What’s all this then?” Ginger: “Scary is going to stay ‘ome and read some American Numpty.” Posh: “Oh my giddy aunt! Idn’t your dishy supposed to be there?” Scary: “I’ll see ‘im next time, we’ll go knees up.” Sporty: “Why are we trundling about? Let’s go then!” Posh: “Scary idn’t coming with us.” Ginger:” Right. She ‘as sum readin’ to do…” Sporty *mouth agape*: Scary! I’m utterly gobsmacked! What of your dishy? Scary: “ ’e may stay ‘ome. ‘e’s been up the spout with ‘is mum’s bills from hospital. Just go on. I’ll come when I’m finished.” Baby: “Right then, it’ll be your round when you arrive.” Scary: “Fair enough. I’ll get a round of jars when I get there. Cheerio!” Baby, Ginger, Posh, and Sporty: “Pip pip!”

Moving on…

The tweet promoting my piece in this hypothetical scenario (in “Spice World” if you will) was retweeted several times. Observe –

Those screenshots are from the day it was published — February 4th. The link supposedly reached up to 72,225. That is if there’s no follower overlap, which there most certainly is in the #writingcommunity

I tweeted the link a couple more times over the next few days using a slightly different featured image and a new quote from the piece and got a few more retweets on February 6th -

The Total from that day is 5,894 + 942 = 6,836 potential views. That’s as many as 158,122 eyeballs feeding visual stimuli to 79061 brains in three days, likely a few hundred less due to follower overlap. Let’s assume that the massively popular fellow from retweet 2/4.1 has every follower that I and the other retweeters have. That’s still 122,400 nostrils smelling the sweet, sweet smell of edgy grammar humor. Alas, my Twitter labors (twabors?) were all in vain. Here are the stats as of February 17th -

Notice in the enlarged “VIEWS BY TRAFFIC SOURCE” box the number by Twitter…

…What? You don’t see “Twitter” in the box. That must mean that of the 60,000 to 70,000 Twitterers who may have seen this, not a one even accidentally clicked on my story. That’s a clickthrough rate of nearly 0%! If only I could’ve gotten it in front of 10,000, 15,000 or even 20,000 more users, I could have reached no less than zero people!

The Medium Dashboard does list Twitter referrals. It looks like this -

These statistics are from my most lucrative story to date.

I tweeted a link in late November that was later retweeted by a dude with 5,698 followers. See -

Let’s say I had 2,500 followers at that time. That would be an upper limit of 8,198 feed appearances. Kindly refer back to the “How I Made…” dashboard screenshot and note the three clickthroughs from Twitter. Three out of 8,198 = %0.03659.

Calculation/Location Digression

By comparison, to get only 1% of those 8198 followers (about 82 people), my link would need to be viewed by 82/3 = 27.3*8198 = 224,024 users. That’s about the population of São Tomé e Príncipe, a small island nation off the western coast of Africa

São Tome e Principe is a multiparty republic with one legislative house located in the Gulf of Guinea in the “Atlantic just north of the equator about 300 kilometers off the northwest coast of Gabon.”

I’ve since started exhaustively researching “Saint Thomas and Prince”, so named due to its discovery by Portuguese explorers on the feast day of Saint Thomas (December 21) in 1471 and learned many interesting facts that, when properly analyzed, could inform life in these here United States. Not least of these is a concept taken from Roman law called “usufruct”.

The Wheel is Still in Spin

With that second digression, I must point out the issue of appeal. I went on tangents about the Spice Girls and a semi-presidential island republic off the western coast of Africa. Perhaps it’s not an issue of exposure, but content. I concede that that is part of the problem. However, rather than 3,000 followers who are only interested in a followback to add another notch to their follower count, I’m fine with 100 fans that have a genuine interest in my shit; the kind who are glad they learned that “Principe” is for Prince Afonso, the only legitimate son of King John II of Portugal, who died in 1491 when he was thrown from his horse.

Thing is, I know there are more than 100 of you out there. Thus, I must continue digressing down rabbit holes so that we can find each other.