Cat Beats Cop
For better or worse, I've been on Twitter since 2011.
Mostly I’ve used my account to chat about comics, and support my comics blog. Longbox Graveyard is closed, now, but the name lives on in my Twitter handle: @LBoxGraveyard.
At this writing, I hover around 5200 followers, most of which are expired, fled from the service, or bots. A few of my old comics pals are still there (and respond when I post comics stuff), and a couple new writer friends interact every now and then. It is a patchy account, to be expected after pivoting from ten years of comic books to supporting my writing endeavors.
I do scheduled posts five days a week, supporting articles from this blog, and I jump on live most weekdays to react and (largely) re-Tweet pulp and film noir images.
All of which is to say I have an entirely normal Twitter account. I've never paid for followers and my expectations of the service are modest.
Watching data as I do, I keep an eye on engagement, specifically view counts of my Tweets. Scheduled Tweets promoting blog posts earn maybe 120 views each. A re-Tweet with a pithy comment will do slightly better. Nothing I post ever catches fire like someone promoting the end of Democracy or trying to boil the oceans. People like what they like.
Every Friday I rotate my "pinned" Tweet -- this is the first message you see on my profile. I discovered that subbing in a fresh message here earns it a bump. It's not a lot -- see above re: comparison to Outrage Machine posts -- but it is noticable. By pinning it several times, I've managed to work my "2023 By The Numbers" Tweet up to about 1500 views. (Converting those views into blog visits is another thing ... it takes about 100 views to get a link click, you can do the math).
A couple weeks ago, I pinned a Tweet promoting a guest blog I did at Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine last year. It's an article about doing a police ride-along when I was twelve. I think it's good and you should read it.
When I pinned this Tweet, it had 206 views. A week later, it had 245. That's a 19% increase, for those of you scoring at home. Not bad if we’re talking about a salary bump, but in Twitter numbers it's virtually indistinguishable from noise.
The next week, I pinned a Tweet promoting the podcast I did with Professor Allen.
It leapt from 172 to 363 views in it's week in the spotlight -- 111% increase!
Cat Beats Cop, and it should be no surprise. Here's an article claiming there are 1.3 billion cat pictures on the internet, and that cats drive 15% of internet traffic. I get it. There aren't any cats in my life right now, but I love them. I miss them and I expect cats are more than 15% of my own internet usage.
If you gotten this far looking for an insight deeper than "generic cat image beats generic cop image," then I apologize. But this is part of writing in the 21st century. We writers are expected to build up "authors platforms" and this blog and Twitter are my answer to that. Social media will swallow every minute you put into it, with (in my experience) dubious returns at anything less than massive scale. But every little bit helps, and cats help most of all. So if you are just starting out ... adopt a cat name, use a cat avatar, and write cats into your titles.
It's not all hooey! I sold a cat story to Ellery Queen a couple weeks ago. I don't doubt the images I'll use to promote that tale when it is published (next year?) will prove the most popular I've ever used, provided we still have a Democracy and oceans by then.
(And, no, I don't call it "X").