In the last two months, I’ve redesigned the site, updated my Instagram profile, changed the profile picture on Instagram from the Iz Mazano logo to an avatar of me and focussed a lot on research about social media for artists and I’ve looked at examples of other poets and poetry initiatives online and am exploring other Social Media platforms.
From a branding perspective, I just realized as I was doing this report how I haven’t standardized things across the platforms where I have a presence. My logo should be replaced with my avatar on Facebook and Twitter and the profile name should be the same everywhere, “The Poetry of Iz Mazano.”
Website
My website (the one you’re on right now) continues to hit spectacularly low numbers in terms of traffic. I wrote earlier on about how I am deliberately not telling my friends on social media about this site because I want to see how hard it is to develop a following from scratch without leaning on a personal following. The reason for this is simple; I’d like to teach this stuff to others in future and I want to be able to speak from experience about this; having no followers, no audience, no readers and starting from there.
Users: 20 (last 28 days)
Sessions: 49 (last 28 days)
Bounce Rate: 61.22%
Session Duration: 5m
The session duration is skewed heavily because one of those users on the site is me and I spend a ton of time on the site. I need to filter my IP out so that my visits don’t register as traffic.
After reading about how great Pinterest is for bloggers and doing some research on this, I set up an Iz Mazano account on March 23rd and am learning more about the platform. I’ve decided it’s going to be the principle focus of my social media efforts for the next six months. To show you how green I am on this platform (even thought I’ve had another Pinterest account under another name for many years), I’ve only posted ten times on the Iz Mazano profile (i.e. made ten pins of my own work) and I have “560 monthly viewers.” I have no idea how that is calculated or what it really means, but I’ll find out.
Impressions: 106 (“Last 30 Days” but obviously only for the two weeks I’ve been on)
Total Audience: 104
Engagements: 2
Engaged Audience: 1
Target: 5,000 impressions in April and let other numbers do what they will.
Twitter surprised me last week. My first Tweet in a long time and the only Tweet in March had 476 impressions. Say what? I am going to look into this a bit more. There is promise here.
Impressions: 836 (Month of March)
Engagement Rate: 0.1%
Retweets: 3
Instagram doesn’t give you detailed analytics until you have at least 100 followers, so I don’t have much data to work with yet. A few weeks ago, I went silent on Instagram and one of the poets I recently followed, sent me a DM to check what was up. That was the first time that’s ever happened and it felt good. It taught me a lesson about not just sort of following but actually becoming invested in the success of certain poets on Instagram and supporting them as much as I can. It’s great to be part of a support network.
Reach: 412 in the last 7 days (Current target: 1,000 per week)
Impressions: 550
The Iz Mazano Facebook page is not really active. I post links to my blog posts and cross post from Instagram, but not much else. My plan right now is to keep this page going because it will be important for much of the promotion, networking and relationship building I want to do in future. I will develop an activation plan for this page in the coming months, but one platform at a time. Pinterest for now. In the past I experimented with paid promotions for this page, which is how it has 1,640 likes. I stopped doing promotions last year because I first want to focus on building a small group of engaged followers on any platform I’m pushing.
Post Reach: 639 (Last 28 days)
Post Engagement: 50
3-Second Video Views: 9
Writer | Digital Storyteller | Web Developer
I believe that every serious artist should be able to make a living from their work if they want to and I’m on a mission to find the best tools, ideas, and resources to help artists succeed. I experiment with business models, monetization ideas, and new technology in my own creative process as part of this journey of discovering.