Poor Responses on Facebook

Poor Responses on Facebook

Do you use Facebook much? Have you noticed any changes in the way other people use it? I use Facebook most days to keep in touch with my friends and people who read my books. I also hope that I will make contact with new readers who might like my style of writing, and I do this by promoting articles, like this one, that I have written for my blog Megan Publishing Services. One way of judging the effectiveness of this technique is to monitor the LIKES and SHARES on my articles, and another is note how many new subscribers they attract to my blog.

The number of visitors a blog attracts is another valuable metric, but that tends to suggest how well your promotion is doing over all the methods of promotion that you use. Megan Publishing Services attracts about a thousand visitors a day and they read more than four thousand pages a day, which is pretty good for a one-man band like mine.

I have been building up these figures for about four years, but I have noticed a change in the response rate of my readers and visitors over the last eighteen months.

A year and a half ago, I could expect thirty-odd Facebook LIKES within an hour of publishing an article on my blog, plus quite a few other social media LIKES and SHARES. This show of appreciation would tail off dramatically after an hour or so, but it would eventually double or even triple. I hoped that by now, so long later, that I would have doubled or tripled those rates, but I have been disappointed. I am actually getting a tenth of those LIKES and SHARES – about three in the first hour and that is a shock.

Why is it happening?

It can’t be explained away by a lack of visitors or interest, because of the thousand visitors per day and the four thousand plus pages a day that they read while there. However, the fact is that those visitors are not responding in the way that they used to. They are not saying that they are enjoying what they are reading (by Liking and Sharing) and they are not expressing other views in the Comments section at the end of each article.

One explanation might be that my articles have become boring, but if that is true, why are a thousand people reading four thousand pages every day?

It seems to me that people just can’t be bothered, or worse, that they won’t LIKE or SHARE for fear of helping the writer of the blog.

I hope that it is not the latter, but clicking a LIKE or SHARE button really doesn’t take much time or energy, so it does seem to be the likely reason.

Is this a sign of the times? People are so envious of other people getting on, that they won’t help even when they are deriving free entertainment?

If that is the case, why have we sunk so low?

Is it because of the state of the economy? We don’t want to see others getting on when we can’t see any light at the end of our own tunnel?

Look at the time stamp at the top of this article and judge from the LIKES and SHARES for yourself.

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All the best,

Owen.

Podcast: Poor Responses on Facebook