Twitter | CW Hawes

Social Media Half-Life

When it comes to social media, Twitter is my go-to platform. It is simple and easy to use.

I do not like Facebook. I have encountered far more nasty people on Facebook, than I have on Twitter. So that is a huge turn off right there.

Secondarily, though, I just don’t care for the presentation of Facebook. It comes off as clunky and a bit antiquated to my mind. Not as bad as GoodReads, which is the absolute worst IMO, but clunky nonetheless.

Nevertheless, I do maintain a presence on Facebook. Mostly because it is a giant among social media platforms. The same reason why I have my books on Amazon, even though I don’t like the company.

The other day, I got thinking about the effectiveness of all the tweeting and FB posting that I do. Is it worth my time? Am I getting any bang for my buck? Buck, in this case, being time investment.

Tooling around the great World Wide Web, looking for an answer, I found the website of ScottGraffius.com — and made the discovery of social media half-life. Read the article: https://scottgraffius.com/blog/files/social-2023.html

In case you’re wondering what this half-life thing is, here’s a definition:

Half-life is the time it takes for a piece of content to receive half of the total number of engagements that it will ever receive.

For social media posts this is the time it takes for the post to receive half of the attention it is ever going to get.

Tweets get buried pretty quickly in the newsfeed.

So it is not surprising to me that half of all potential readers will see my tweet within 24 minutes after I’ve posted it. And 50 minutes later — that tweet is gone from the newsfeed.

Which means, that my once a day appearance on Twitter is probably a waste of time. My tweets have all vanished by the time I leave the site for the day.

Of course, they are there should anyone look at my personal Twitter page. And people obviously do go there, because my pinned tweet is re-tweeted. Nevertheless, unless picked up by someone else, after 50 minutes that retweet is gone.

So if you do not have a large number of people retweeting your tweet throughout the day — it is gone within 50 minutes after you’ve posted it.

Facebook has a longer half-life: 1.75 hours for a post. However, there are some who think FB nukes your post from the newsfeed after 2 hours. Which means an FB post may only have a 2 hour lifespan, instead of 3.5.

Of course, the post will still be on your profile or page should anyone go there — but how many do? That, my friends, is a good question.

From the little that I’ve talked with folks about their FB habits, I’d say nearly everyone just looks at their newsfeed.

Also on FB is the “problem” that I get very few, if any, shares. A like is fine, but a share will extend the post’s lifespan. No shares and I’d say posting is next to worthless.

So what can we take away from this half-life info?

I haven’t come to any definite conclusions. However, initially, I think I have to agree with the gurus that using social media to sell books is pretty much a waste of time. The ROI is way too low.

It wasn’t always that way for me. Twitter did result in sales. But, alas, no more. Nothing but crickets for the past couple of years.

As an experiment, this past Sunday I tweeted every 24 minutes for half the day a book I had on sale for 99¢. And on FB, I posted every 1.75 hours for the same book for half the day.

The result? I sold one, that is 1, copy. All that time investment (4 or 5 hours), and I made 35¢. I’d say it wasn’t worth it.

I do have 2 auto-tweet platforms that I use. But they won’t tweet more than every hour. Which might work. I may give it a test run.

But is all of this time investment worth what will probably be a minuscule ROI?

Once set up, the auto-tweeters will run on their own. But I do have to set them up and periodically change the books. And hopefully avoid Twitter shutting me down for spamming.

Yesterday, Monday, I conducted another half-day test on a full-price book. The result? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No sales.

So I probably have my answer. Tweeting and FB posting don’t drive sales. Or any significant amount of sales.

Now something to think about is this: a YouTube post has a half-life of 8.8 days. And the average half-life of a blogpost is 2 years.

There are those who argue that blogging is dead. Perhaps it is. But if it is, there are millions of folks who haven’t gotten the news.

So what if I combined blogging with vlogging? That might end up being the best combo. It is something to think about.

And maybe the best of all possible worlds is building an active fan base on my mailing list. But that’s a thought for another post.

Want I do know is this: Twitter and Facebook take up at least a couple hours of my day — and I am only on each platform once a day! For all that activity what are my sales? Zilch. Nada. Zip. Zero.

The one advantage, and probably the best advantage, lies not in selling — but in all of the good people I’ve met. And it’s pretty difficult to put a price tag on them.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes

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The Wonderful Machine Age: Socialists, Communists, and Labor Unions

“In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. … Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability… Labour [is] unavoidably become dishonourable, as being evidence of poverty.”

Thorstein Veblen coined the terms “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The above quote, taken from the chapter, “Conspicuous Leisure”, points out the goal of every Victorian middle-class gentleman: to have so much money he needn’t work and was therefore able to buy whatever his heart desired.

The fabulous wealth generated by industry during the Machine Age spawned an entire class of people who didn’t work. They lived off their “living” and displayed their wealth in the most ostentatious manner possible.

Every coin, however, has a flip side. And while the Machine Age gave rise to a wealthy class, that wealth was generated on the backs of poorly paid laborers.

The lot of those in service was low wages, long hours, rudimentary living conditions, and the fear of being sacked with no reference.

Factory workers lost hands, arms, legs, or their lives working around machines with no safety guards. Lung disease was common amongst miners and textile workers. All in addition to receiving low wages, without any benefits.

It is reported that when the Titanic was sinking, the passageways from the lower decks were blocked to prevent any but the rich from getting a seat on the lifeboats.

When Marie Antoinette supposedly uttered those famous words, “let them eat cake”, it wasn’t because she was mean—it was because she genuinely thought the peasants had simply run out of bread and didn’t want to eat the cake they had. Ignorance of the plight of the peasant didn’t prove to be bliss in her case. And the lack of concern for how the middle class and the wealthy got their money at the beginning of the Machine Age, gave rise to powerful political and social dynamics that are still with us, long after the Machine Age came to an end.

Labor Unions

To improve working conditions, workers began to organize. In the US, the National Labor Union was founded in 1866. It was not overly successful and disbanded in 1874. It did, however, pave the way for more successful unions, such as the many railroad unions, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

In Britain, unions were legalized in 1871 and were responsible for the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 to represent their interests in the government.

The story of the labor movement is too long to be told here. The significance of the movement to my mind was it’s largely successful attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie for workers. The people who produced the goods that generated the wealth for the Leisure Class, we’re entitled to a fair wage, fair benefits, and safe working conditions.

All of which we take for granted today. Fair wages, fair benefits, and safe working conditions are no longer up for discussion. They are now the norm and I think that is good. The laborer is worthy of his hire, the New Testament says. And it took labor unions to make honest Christians of many industrialists.

The scene in the movie Metropolis where the hero, the naive son of a wealthy industrialist, sees the factory workers, portrayed as automatons, and then himself works at a machine, I think tells it all.

Socialism

The horror that was so often the late 19th century and early 20th century workplace and the wasteful opulence of the minority Leisure Class versus the majority Working Class, gave rise to Socialism — a social and economic system advocating social ownership or control of the means of production and the replacement of production for profit with production for use.

A socialist economy eschews the accumulation of capital and favors a system whereby goods are produced to satisfy individual and social needs.

Various forms of Socialism existed prior to the Machine Age. The form in which we see it today began as the Industrial Revolution ramped up the production of goods and successful business owners and industrialists grew rich, along with investors who didn’t work for a living. The notion that wealth should be shared by all gained adherents amongst the working class. How the working class should get their fair share was not universally agreed upon. But that they were entitled to more than what they were getting was universally agreed upon by Socialists.

The income tax (usually in a progressive form), worker-owned businesses, cooperatives, minimum wage, “free” public education (paid for by taxes), and “free” healthcare (paid for by taxes) are all ideas based on Socialist ideals.

Communism

Like Socialism, Communism existed in many forms prior to the Industrial Revolution. Vladimir Lenin advocated a particularly violent form of socialism which had its origins in the thought of Louis Auguste Blanqui, where a small band of revolutionaries should seize the government and then use the power of the state to enforce Socialism.

Lenin blended Blanqui’s views with those of Karl Marx to form the social-political-economic theories of the Communist Party. Marxism-Leninism has characterized the thought of Communists since the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Rising out of the Machine Age, Communism produced or was responsible for a multitude of horrors in the 20th Century. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Nikolai Ceausescu, Kim Jong-il, Mao Zedong, and we must always remember Adolf Hitler rose to power in part as a crusader against Communism.

Some Thoughts

The Industrial Revolution and the Machine Age which followed were perhaps the greatest catalysts for social and political change since the invention of farming, which turned humans from wandering hunter-gatherers into civilization builders.

The Machine Age accelerated the urbanization of the Western world. Most people today live in cities and their sprawling suburbs and think their food comes from a store. They have little connection to the earth. How can they surrounded as they are by concrete, glass, asphalt, steel, plywood, and particle board? Is it any wonder people have little concept of what it means to protect the environment? Or why consumerism runs rampant, fueled by governments seeking economic growth? Growth which succeeds because people are no longer in touch with the earth, only the greed of their primal hunter-gatherer natures.

The Machine Age resulted in wonderful inventions which have enriched our lives — but it also had a dark side: dehumanization. I think this is in part why we have noir films and literature, why dissonance in art music became so prevalent from the 1920s onward, why totalitarianism became a reality in the ‘20s and ‘30s and continues in our democratic societies today as governments extensively monitor their citizens. And perhaps an even more insidious form of totalitarianism has arisen in the Digital Age with corporations such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon monitoring everything we do in order to try to control our behavior — all so someone can sell us something. Max Headroom?

Labor Unions, Socialism, Communism, and even Fascism and Nazism were all attempts to deal with the dark side of the Machine Age. And they did, with mixed results.

Today’s world has been built on yesterday’s and done so with mixed results.

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Guest Blog Post by Alice E Keyes

Today I have the privilege of having writer and soon to be author Alice E Keyes as guest blogger. I met Alice on the 8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks forum some time back and then in the Twitterverse and on G+.

I very much enjoy her artistic imagination and how it comes out in her fiction. I look forward to the release of Miss Winsome and the Scientific Society later this year. And now, here’s Alice!

When CW asked me to do a guest blog for his web page, I wondered what I could possible blog about. My own blog has gone from laborious and naive posts on the writing process to occasional flash fiction and snippets from works-in-progress. When I read CW’s “What’s Cooking?” post, I was inspired to write this blog post.

CW has become a great online writing friend who has been encouraging me to finish a novella, which I started in November 2014. It’s July and I’m a good nitpicky rewrite and line edit away from self-publishing it. He has inspired me from his own self-published books to his recent editing of said novella.

The people online and in person, who have given me eureka writing moments since I began scribbling ideas and scenes in a blank notebook, have been an unforeseen benefit in my pursuit of publishing a book. When I first started writing, I wrote for the creative outlet. I hadn’t painted or drawn in years and my brain begged me to do anything creative. The notebook would come out when I was waiting for my children to finish up an activity or when the idea of doing housework was abhorrent to me. The wacky tidbits were strange, odd, and what I wished I could find in novels being sold.

Noodling around on the Internet and looking at the growing world of self-publishing vs. traditional, I discovered NaNoWriMo which was already three days into the writing month. Yes, I’m another author propelled into writing a complete novel in a mere thirty days or in my case, twenty-seven days. When I finished 50,000 words on November 30, 2009, the joy was indescribable. I actually finished something I started. I thought the premise of my novel was good, but I was unsure of my writing abilities.

Writing in school was tortuous for me. The amount of red corrections on my papers would make me cry. I worked so hard on every essay, story, or poem. I would reread and rewrite to catch the typos and other mistakes. Because of this experience, I sought out ways to have people read what I had written for free. I didn’t ask my husband because he doesn’t read fiction except on rare occasions, nor did I ask friends, because I was too embarrassed my stories might be bad. Really bad. I went to Goodreads and found a couple of beta readers to go over, what I thought were, four carefully edited chapters. Their critiques were a rude awakening and made me realize I had a lot of work to do.

There are countless blogs telling you to not publish before you have had your manuscript read by an unbiased editor and to have that done after each rewrite and then finally have a line editor go over it for the typos, grammar, and misspellings. I couldn’t afford the editor’s prices for these services, so I started to post chapter by chapter on Critique Circle. This started to improve my writing and I had little eureka moments, but comments like, “it needs more emotion,” or “you have a lot of awkward sentences” confused me. I put chapters through edit programs and I had a few more eureka moments. My writing improved and the critiques I received at Critique Circle also improved.

Along the way, I met other writers struggling to improve their work. CW was one and when he asked if he could edit, Miss Winsome and the Scientific Society, I was nervous. He had become my friend and I had read a couple of his novels. What if it was another critique telling me my writing abilities were sophomoric or worse that he would wonder why he had spent his valuable time on such bad work? His edit was thorough and explained why trying to use third person point of view wasn’t working and then gave detailed instructions on how to change the problem. His edit was the most helpful I had ever received even above “professional” editors who would look at a few chapters for free to see if you wanted their services. I had another eureka writing moment.

I now feel that my first self-published book won’t be a sophomoric self-published effort, but something that might have a chance in the saturated indie book market. My slow and steady education on writing a novel has been fraught with disappointment, but the friendships I have made along the way will keep me motivated to find the next writing eureka moment and push me to achieve the goal of becoming a self-published author.

My advise on the need to getting your work edited before you publish is you don’t have to find a professional and expensive editor. The editor you need is someone with an understanding of grammar and an understanding of what makes a novel an enjoyable read. That person can be a spouse, a sister, or friend but never someone who belittles your efforts, tells you everything is great, or gives you vague, unexplained critiques.

What Alice is saying was said by the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke over a hundred years ago to a fledgling poet. Once you’ve decided you can do nothing but write, then structure your world so that is what you can do. The importance of supportive people, who will give you honest appraisals cannot be overestimated. Neither can our listening to the advice these people give us.

Thanks, Alice! Looking forward to the release of Miss Winsome and the Scientific Society.

And now here is little bit about Alice herself:

Alice E Keyes will be publishing her debut novella in 2015. Yellowstone National Park is the location for the steampunk dime store novella and has played an important part in her life. Her mother spotted a cowboy there and decided he was the one. Alice graduated from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana and she now lives in Cody, Wyoming, both of which are a mere hour’s drive to the first national park. Though she has left the Rockies, once to student teach in England and once to meet her husband in Maryland, their mountains, streams, and towns call her back. She lives four blocks from public land where her favorite mountain biking trails are located. Besides biking and writing, she spends her time with her husband, son, daughter and two Britney dogs.

Connect with Alice at the following places:

https://aliceekeyes.blogspot.com

https://twitter.com/aliceEkeyes

http://on.fb.me/1CjnS8d

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