The Costs and Benefits of Leaving Twitter

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I broke an old and aggravating addiction on Wednesday, November 9th, when I announced in this space that I was quitting Twitter, a social networking relationship that I had sometimes enjoyed and sometimes barely tolerated for the past thirteen-plus years.  I anticipated two outcomes when I finally made the decision to pull the plug on Twitter.  One was that I would suddenly find myself with an abundance of time on my hands that I had not enjoyed previously, and the second was that this blog, Pa Rock's Ramble, would suffer a marked loss in readership because I would no longer be promoting it daily on Twitter.    Both of those assumptions proved to be correct.

I have several projects underway which have been suffering from neglect.  As soon as I broke with Twitter I began focusing on getting all of the Ancestry Archives columns that have run in the Ramble organized into two family books - and in just a little over a week I have made significant progress on the first of those books.  I have also made progress on a couple of fiction pieces that had been on life-support, gotten some yard word finished before winter sets in, completed an overnight roadtrip, and managed to keep up with this blog.

Quitting Twitter has reminded me of what being retired felt like in the early days of that adventure, and I feel that my attitude has improved markedly.

There have also been costs to leaving the platform.  Some of those are psychological.  I miss being able to rush over to Twitter to blast off some snappy insult when I see a story in the press that gets me going.  It is much like howling at the moon - and accomplishes nothing - but still makes me feel better for having howled.  Being an addict, I couldn't just rush in, howl, and then rush back out.  Once I was on the platform I would get pulled twenty ways by tweets, replies, news stories, you name it - and by the time I pulled myself back into the sane world several hours might have passed.  The twitterverse is thoroughly engrossing, highly addictive, and almost totally devoid of merit.

But it is also an effective sales platform, and I have used Twitter shamelessly - and without actual cost - to promote my blog for several years.  On a typical day I would (and still do) get the daily blog posing up about 10:00 a.m. or so - and then I would plug is five or six times during the day on Twitter trying to stir some interest in that day's topic.  I had used that strategy for several years, and up until a year or so ago, I would normally have in excess of fifty visitors to the blog each day.  

Then six months or so ago I toyed with the idea of discontinuing Pa Rock's Ramble and discussed that possibility on the blog itself.   At the point readership took a sudden dip to between thirty to forty readers on most days.  (Perhaps people were reflecting my apparent lack of commitment by growing their own lack of commitment.)   But readership leveled off and remained at 30 to 40 per day up until I unplugged from Twitter.

With a shoutout to Dr. Truman Volsky of Missouri Southern State College who many years ago taught me about the measures of central tendency, here is a look at the change in The Ramble's readership over the past two weeks:

First, for the seven days up to and including the day that I left Twitter:   readership per day ranged from 30 to 56 with a mean (average) of 41.14 readers per day, a median of 35, and a mode of 35.

Second, for the seven days after I left Twitter and quit plugging the blog on that platform:  readership ranged from 13 to 22 with a mean of 17.42 readers per day, a median of 18, and a mode of 18.

The lights were still on, but fewer and fewer people were coming to visit.

Clearly I have some pondering to do, and now that I don't have to spend hours each day lobbing insults at stable geniuses cleaners like Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, maybe I will have time to ponder productively!   And if I wind up with too much time on my hands, I may take up trout fishing!   Or ham radio!