Over the last few days, I’ve run two satirical blog posts: Get More Twitter Followers TODAY and 10 – no 4!! – Days to Become a Social Media Expert. They were meant to highlight how silly it is that there’s an entire cash-sucking industry built around getting more followers or learning about social media.
What I didn’t expect were the stats. I want to share my findings with you:
The arrow marked “twitter post” shows the final day’s tally for the day I ran that post. The second arrow that’s marked “expert post” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because the stats show both the Twitter post *and* the expert post helping drive my traffic. What’s just crazy is the third arrow labeled “so far.”
For whatever reason, my stats package thinks the new day starts at about 10PM ET. I get a new graph every day at that time. I took that snapshot at Midnight ET of the day the expert post ran. That means I’m going to have one of my best blog traffic days ever on Saturday the 8th of August, and for what? A couple of silly posts?
Here’s the breakdown of the traffic on the day of the Twitter post:

And here’s the breakdown of traffic so far of the “so far” day:

What Does This All Mean?
Near as I can tell, it means that writing absurd pieces that mock or mirror the current status quo of things we’re passionate about like Twitter and Social Media can get some attention. But I think there’s more to it. Because people don’t expect snarky, sarcastic blog posts from me (or do you?), I think my efforts had even more impact. What’s your take on that?
Oh, I meant to tell you, on the day that I got the huge push against the Twitter post, LOTS of that traffic walked in the front door instead of clicking in from any discernible source:

So that means it wasn’t even pulled in via Twitter, but by sources either not tracked, or by people just typing in my URL.
Beyond this, I’m as stumped as you. I feel crazy and yet curious. There’s something to this little case study in the absurd. But what?
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