Musing about the engagement my posts get on various social media platforms
I confess that one reason I like Bluesky is that my posts sometimes get more attention there than they tend to on other non-FB platforms.
I post the same things to all the platforms I’m on. Usually the original post is on Facebook, and then I post abbreviated versions of it to all the other platforms I’m on, because they all have character-count limits. (This reposting unfortunately means some people see the same post in multiple places, but on each platform I have some friends and followers who aren’t on the other platforms.) (In some cases, I post here to my blog instead of posting to the non-Facebook platforms.) But the posts get different amounts of attention in different places.
Like, on Twitter, back when I posted there, my posts tended to get an average of 0 engagement. (I’m rounding down.) Maybe something like 1 in 5 posts would get a like or a retweet or two? (All of the numbers in this post are guesses; I haven’t run stats.) But most of my tweets got no engagement. (Which is fair; I didn’t engage a lot with other people on Twitter either.)
On Mastodon, the numbers are similar, though I feel like when people do engage with my posts there, that engagement comes from more different people than the few who sometimes engaged with my tweets.
On Facebook, my posts tend to get an average of about 10-15 likes and comments and shares, which feels comfortable to me. (The usual range being from about 0 to about 50.) Not infrequently, a post gets a few dozen more than that, which is always nice. I dislike all sorts of things about FB, but what keeps me there as my primary social media platform is the sense of community.
On Bluesky, most of my posts get about 0-2 likes and reposts (average of about 1), but some of them get a couple dozen. And my post from earlier this week about David Tennant and the trans-flag-colored TARDIS pin has now had nearly 750 likes and reposts on Bluesky, which is more than the vast majority of my FB posts, and probably far more than anything I ever posted on Twitter. And the responses I get on Bluesky, even from strangers, are mostly positive.
I don’t generally think a lot about engagement numbers for my posts. I post things that I think are interesting and worth sharing, and I figure that how much reaction they get on a given platform generally has more to do with the vagaries of that platform’s Algorithm than with much of anything else.
But even so, when I visit Bluesky it’s relatively likely that I’ll see notifications telling me that people liked things that I posted. And much as I wouldn’t want to get all of my validation from a source like that, I can’t deny that it’s a nice feeling.