Philoking.com

I decided to start putting more time into my blog again. I updated my theme to something more pleasing for readers, I started working on new content, and then I decided to take a look at where I stand on traffic. It’s amazing to me that I had gone two months without writing something. I assumed I was left for dead, yet here I am with nearly 300 average visitors per day, 11,000+ page views in the last 30 days.

It was a lot of working building my blog up in the beginnings. It’s a testament to the work that you put in that after you get the love from the search engines, they don’t really forget you. Sure my statistics are terrible. 93.45% new visitors? That’s all search engine traffic. 25 seconds per average visit? That means they are finding the content, reading and leaving. Looks like I need to invest in some more relevant content. 89% bounce rate? Obviously I don’t present interesting content in a way compelling enough to get them to click through.

So I’ll start with adding some great new content. I’ll work on my layout a little bit to make sure that my best foot is forward so to speak. Then I’ll get back into a building mode. This blog used to get over 30,000 unique visitors a month. I can get back there, I just have to put in the work.

Tonight I had a friend tell me, “Just deleted my Twitter account, feels good.” I asked why, she responded that she didn’t need it anymore.” Sound theory, but I’d like to offer a little counter advice, the same advice I gave her.

Never delete your social network accounts. In an age where digital fraud is common, and social engineering is the #1 form of hacking, deleting a social network is at best a way to give someone a free pass to impersonate you and at worst giving someone a ticket to try to attack all of your friends.

See, the thing is, when you delete your account, after a period of time, that username will be opened up again, someone can register that and then use it pretending to be you. Anyone from a crazy ex-boyfriend or wife to a Nigerian scam artist.

So what do to instead? Easy, if you can just blank out all of the personal identifying information (PII) on the account and leave it active. If you didn’t care enough to delete it, you shouldn’t care if it’s still out there and full of junk info.

If the site won’t allow you to empty it, just fill it with crap. Create a junk email address, change your primary to that, and fill it with made up information. Make up a name, etc.

The nice side effect is that if you ever decide you want that account back, you can just start using it again. No harm!

In the beginning I accepted every request. When a graduation class group started, the invites started pouring in like a flood. I accepted all of them and before long I had over 300 friends on Facebook. These days I have 136, and regularly I go through the list and prune it here and there.

I get invites from people I know, and I ignore them. I don’t ignore all of them of course, but I have built criteria over time.

So, what’s the most valuable real estate on Facebook? My feed is the most valuable to me. That’s how I keep up with what the people I care about are up to, and I make sure that I don’t have to sift through things that are irrelevant to me to see it.

Maybe if I read my feed non-stop it wouldn’t matter so much, but as I only check it every little bit, having a mountain of friends will mean you miss a whole lot.

Case in point, my family owns a restaurant in North Carolina. I live in Bellevue, Washington over 3,000 miles away. Now logic would say “it’s your family so accept that request!” but I say no. Any events, specials or news they share will be of no use to me. It may be a bit militaristic, but if the individual family members I follow are on Facebook, I will see what is up in their lives, I don’t need to follow their workplace.

The same goes for vague acquaintances from high school, college and past jobs. Sure my close friends stay, but I see every person that I don’t have a close tie to as potentially erasing information from people I do care about by bumping them down the feed.

I refuse to believe that I have even 136 friends that I should be following so closely, but I have settled at that number…for now.

I guess it comes down to what do you use a social network for. If you are of the narcissistic camp and just want everyone you have ever met to see how awesome you are now, collect away. If you are in the community camp, keep your friends to people you actually engage with and you might find it to be a lot more useful, fun and relevant.

I just want to let this quote sink in. This is from one of Google’s engineers talking about their email system Gmail

"Gmail was a beta app for a while in itself and that kind of let us as a company not be too afraid about getting something out that may screw up once in a while."

Wow.

It’s pretty common to see this type of pattern. Usually it’s us geeks who get there first. We were the first to chat online, we had email and digital cameras first, heck, who do you think it was that made online porn go mainstream. Early adopters, or internet pioneers as the more pretentious ones like to call it, are usually the same folks.

Something cool comes along, we pass it along our own little channels, it grows and grows, and eventually someone who isn’t wearing taped up glasses and high water pants notices. That’s what happened with Twitter. I hate to break it to Matt Stenning, the author of the post “Is Twitter Losing Respect?”, but your little special place of geekness was lost long before Trends got screwed up or Direct Message Spam. I can breakdown the spiral in two words: Ashton Kutcher.

But there is something interesting, in this reality, the spiral doesn’t go down, the spiral goes up. Instead of being an internet celebrity with 5 figure followers and moderate notoriety on Digg or Engadget, now the real stars have showed up with 7 figure followers and brought their fans with them.

It was over when they started giving out Twitter IDs on the nightly news, or when every event known to man had a feed. But over isn’t over. Over is the beginning of a new type of social media. Twitter made micro-blogging matter.

The reality is that Twitter has a user base now. And that user base could care less if @JohnReese, @MikeFilsaime, @ChrisBrogan and @ProBlogger took a flying leap off of a mountain. Between the four of them, and their 219k combined followers, they pale in comparison to Oprah’s nearly 2 million.

Those four combined don’t have 1/4 of the followers of the bottom of the top 100. Reality check folks, you were a big fish in a small pond. Just because you can’t keep up, doesn’t mean it’s over.