I've been tracking engagement with my posts based on Facebook's statistics system and I've noticed an interesting trend: to retain readership I have to post something "purely fun" at least one ever three weeks -- more than that seems like I'm trivializing the channel, less than this amount garners reader dropoff.
I decided to test my observations with a micro-research "project". My recent post about a well-edited video featuring an "Imperial Starport at the Frankfurt airport" (see below) had ten times my normal readership, but the readership on following posts was up 10-20%.
So, what does this tell us? Blog experts encourage you to include images and video (Clark & Vahab, 2013) and to cover a variety of topics relevant to your audience (Cohen, 2014). That's fine -- but my micro-research effort demonstrates again that sometimes you have to add something that's going to catch their interest and encourage them to return. Most of my longer posts have poor readership and they definitely result in less engagement later, as you can see from this small snapshot of the page's engagement statistics:
When I create a post that has more general appeal a short "long tail" is visible for a couple of weeks. If, during that period I also post something with heightened appeal the tail can be lengthened slightly. Well reasoned, critically written posts don't tend to sustain readership as strongly.
It may be worth conducting a formal study of various blogs to see if this trend holds true for other fields of interest and/or blogs written by other types of authors. Does anyone have any ideas for taking this to the next level?
References
Clark, D., & Vahab, D. (2013, November 1). How To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog.Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2013/11/01/how-to-drive-more-
traffic-to-your-blog/
Cohen, H. (2014) heidicohen.com
Very interesting! I really like the idea of a professor Facebook page, I had not considered it before. Do you use anything similar within the Learning Management System (eg. a discussion board for non-class related chatter etc.?). My college really encourages us to use the LMS for all communications, but I think that a professional FB connection would be very useful. Great study!
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