Three years ago I wrote a blog post offering my opinions on the most popular social media platforms at the time. That post had a lot of interest and I was recently reading through it with a view to updating it (SEO, new pics and all that) but realised that it's pretty outdated now and can't really be salvaged without a complete rewrite.
Instead of changing that post, I've decided to leave it there as a reminder of how quickly times change and things move on online and write a whole new post with my current opinions on the main social sites and apps. I've included all the ones I wrote about before, even those which are pretty much obsolete now, just to show how things have changed in the past few years.
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Twitter is still my favourite social media platform. I've been on there for ten years now and still enjoy it. I've met so many amazing people through Twitter over the years, both bloggers and non-bloggers, and hope that I'll continue to do so for a good few years yet. I still promote my blog posts on there and make use of RT accounts to help me with promo. Twitter is my second biggest referrer for blog traffic (you'll find out the first later in this post) so I love it for that as well as the social aspect.
Oh, Instagram. The platform we all love to hate. In recent years it's been harder for bloggers to grow on there, with the algorithm only showing your pictures to a small proportion of your followers and the sheer volume of people playing the follow/unfollow game. I follow people because I want to see their content, so I'd appreciate it if Insta actually showed it to me. I'm also not convinced that Instagram is particularly good for generating blog traffic, because I hardly ever 'swipe up' on someone's story or go to their profile and click on the link to their blog (we're still not able to have clickable links in photo captions, wtf) and I don't see Instagram pop up as a referrer in my Google Analytics much. Personally I use Insta more as a personal account, to post pictures of my food or places I've been and to engage with other people's photos, rather than using it to promote my blog.
I'd love to know your thoughts on Instagram. Do you get many click-throughs to your site from there?
BlogLovin'
I think BlogLovin' is becoming less and less popular with bloggers nowadays. I personally don't go on there much anymore. My blog posts still automatically show up on there when I publish them and I get a bit of traffic from that, but it's not my go-to place to read blogs from anymore so I understand that other bloggers are probably the same and that's why my traffic from BL has slowly been dropping over the last few years. I'm not sure how much longer it'll last as a platform so I wouldn't even suggest new bloggers bother about creating an account, because it probably won't provide much value to your site. Or maybe it will - everyone's different.
Still hate Facebook. In fact I don't even have an account anymore. Well, I deactivated it which means I can log in at any point and my profile would still be there, but I can't remember the last time I did so. When I was on FB I joined a few blogging groups but didn't find them very helpful - they were mainly full of people just promoting their own content and not interacting (and I like interaction and building relationships). I know a lot of people will disagree with me about Facebook because they get tonnes of traffic from there, but I don't find it useful for growing my blog, and I'm not interested in what people from school who I haven't seen for 20 years, my ex from 10 years ago and family I've never met but thought it appropriate to add me anyway, are up to now.
Google+
Not a very useful platform either - it never really took off, did it? I still share my blog posts on there whenever I upload and get a small amount of views from doing so, but I don't go on there to read other content or to chat - it's always like a ghost town.
Blogging Communities
I don't use blogging communities anymore but I'm including them here because I raved about them back in 2016 and wanted to show how different things are now. My two favourites at the time were Health Bloggers Community and UK Bloggers. HBC had a forum which was great because I could chat with other health and fitness bloggers and share each other's posts. Unfortunately the forum part of the site shut down and moved to a Facebook group (damn you, Facebook) so that was that. I'm not sure if the UK Bloggers site still exists and I can't even be bothered to check; that's how indifferent I am about communities now.
Pinterest wasn't included in my previous list because I had no idea how to use it at the time - in fact, I only learnt Pinterest properly about halfway through 2018. I'm so glad I finally took the time to learn it because I now get so much blog traffic from there, it beats all the other platforms combined. About 70-80% of my views now come from Pinterest in just a few months of utilising it properly and I don't know how I ever lived without it. It definitely takes a little work upfront but the time investment is so worth it. I used this course to crack Pinterest and it was the best money I ever spent (it wasn't even expensive).
What are your favourite and least favourite social media platforms? Do you agree or disagree with any of my opinions? Let me know down in the comments.
You can read my original post The Best and Worst Social Media Platforms for Bloggers from January 2016 if you fancy a bit of a laugh or to see how much has changed on social media in the past three years.
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