What a month of blog analytics taught me about social media platforms

If you’re a blogger or researcher sharing your work online, you’ve probably wondered: is social media actually useful for disseminating your writing? I’ve been asking myself this question since returning to blogging just over a month ago.

So I decided to check some analytics. Since late April, I’ve been tracking where my blog readers actually come from when I share posts across different platforms. I share my results from this 30-day snapshot (late April through late May) below.

The data: where readers actually come from

Before diving into the numbers, a quick note on methodology. I use SimpleAnalytics because it respects visitor privacy (e.g., it respects blockers or “do not track” browser signals). This means some traffic sources might go untracked if users have strict privacy settings, but it gives us a decent view of the platforms that are actually driving traffic to my posts.

Over the past month, I’ve shared each new blog post consistently across three platforms: Twitter/X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. Most of these simply a sentence or a copy+paste of the front matter of the blog, sometimes with a screenshot of the post from my laptop or my phone. I’ve also been posting at random times (basically whenever a post is completed).¹ Okay, this isn’t really a rigorous scientific experiment… whatever.

When I examined the referral data after excluding direct links and other sources (a pretty large fraction of results), the distribution was a bit surprising:

• LinkedIn: 51.4%
• Bluesky: 26.0%
• Twitter/X: 22.7%

Twitter/X: When reach doesn’t translate to readership

Twitter’s poor performance in driving actual blog readership is particularly pathetic when you consider the platform’s apparent reach. I’ve had several tweets gain (fairly?) significant traction, e.g. my blog migration tweet was noticed by Simon Willison, and subsequently got 36,000 views. Yet despite his generous attention, the actual number of actual blog visits was comically low.

Another one of my posts got over 9000 views on Twitter — not bad, right? But in fact, only 100 people had actually clicked through to read the full blog post. This represents roughly a 1% conversion rate, which suggests that Twitter’s engagement metrics are totally disconnected from genuine reader interest. In any event, most of my posts get only a few hundred views (i.e. less than a quarter of my follower count), since I don’t pay for that blue check mark (or use Twitter as its own microblogging platform, now that I’ve chosen to “own” my content).

LinkedIn: Steady and reliable (for now)

In contrast to Twitter’s up-and-down metrics, LinkedIn has been way more steady over the month. My posts on the platform typically generate between 800–4000 views. LinkedIn consistly delivers sustained visibility (often spanning multiple weaks) for my blog posts. And this seems to work: over half of my blog visits originate from LinkedIn! I was kind of shocked to see this, since academics and researchers rarely use LinkedIn, and the platform is generally known as a pretty low-signal source of information…

If there’s any social media platform that I might be more inclined to post on regularly, it would be LinkedIn. However, for now I’m not planning to change my usage patterns significantly. After all, we’ve seen what can happen when unhinged billionaires acquire social media platforms (and I’m not eager to invest heavily in a platform that could become even more pay-to-play overnight).

Bluesky: The surprising dark horse

Bluesky has also been a surprisingly helpful platform despite its small apparent size. Although Bluesky still feels like a niche social media site² compared to the other two, it’s driving 26% of my social media referral traffic, placing it solidly ahead of Twitter.

On one hand, I actually have the highest follower count on Bluesky (among the three platforms). On the other, the Bluesky’s chronological timeline makes it much harder to go viral compared to its competitors. This design constraint probably favors consistent, regular engagement from regular bloggers, over the transient spikes that characterize viral posts on other platforms. Or maybe Bluesky simply has a more dedicated user base that actually spends more time connecting with others on the platform rather than scrolling past things without reading.

What this means for writers and researchers

I’ve found that regular blogging has made me a better writer, and helped me organize my thoughts and clarify my thinking. It’s also served as a public record for my own future reference. These benefits exist regardless of whether anyone reads my posts!

This brief foray into my blog post analytics has reminded me of a lesson that’s easy to forget in the social media age: writing should be pursued for its own sake, not simply as fuel for social media engagement. The data certainly provides useful tidbits about platform effectiveness, but the more important takeaway is that I have very little control over social media platforms, and that expanding social media reach is totally orthogonal to writing a half-decent post.

Moving forward, I’m not planning to spend any more effort crafting platform-specific social media posts. Instead, I’ll focus on what actually matters: writing blog posts that help me think more clearly and document my academic and intellectual journey. Hopefully, if your writing is genuinely useful to you — i.e., it helps you understand something better, or articulate ideas you needed to work through — then readers will likewise find it valuable, regardless of which platform brought them there.