A Snapshot of My Current Influence
In this article I report my social metrics across the sites I currently monitor for such things. I don't report on my entire online presence, exempting things like Reddit where I'm currently not trying to execute influence.
You can access my various social profiles here at my social homepage. The social homepage also has an open source template form that you can use for yourself here.
- TikTok Followers: 20.3k
- GitHub Stars: 56
- Ignoring DevFit which would add 12 more but I basically credit this to Ben Awad not me
- Twitter Followers: 2686
- StackOverflow Karma: 2099
- YouTube Subscribers: 421
- Twitch Followers: 78
- LinkedIn Followers: 1454
- Instagram Followers: 299
- Ladderly Registered Students: 186
- Ladderly Discord Channel Members: 54
- Substack Subscribers: 17
- AfterEcon Facebook Page Members: 444
- AfterEcon Mailchimp Subscribers: 6
- AfterEcon WordPress.com Followers: 6
- Google Scholar Citations: 3
- Paper Count: 9
- SSRN has 1 or 2 additional citations
In addition to the prior follower numbers, here are some impression counts:
- 15M TikTok views and 736k likes
- 762k Tweet impressions
- 242k all time views on my legacy blog
- 110k all time views on AfterEcon
- 55k YouTube views
- 35k annual views on LinkedIn
Reflecting on my content creation, which began in 2010, below are five tips on growing an audience.
- High frequency > Low frequency
- Short form content > Long form content
- Tech + Finance material > Gaming, philosophy, research, and political content. Music does OK too.
- Memes work very well. Humor works okay, but on average it seems to work better in meme form and without my face visible 😭😭
- Repurposing and multi-channeling work
- Similar content may perform very differently on various platforms for reasons including tag differences, ideal content length, Copyright, and more. Understanding a new platform seems to take at least three dozen posts. Watermarks seem to carry a substantial penalty.
Note that growing an audience is not the only thing we should be optimizing for. In particular, good content creators create good content, but good content, ironically, will often not grow an audience. This is missed in the commentary of many others who tautologically suppose that content that grows an audience is good by definition. Instead, I propose, good content includes identifying and communicating true information in a non-manipulative way. Replicable and peer reviewed academic work is an example of good content that a mass audience will generally find repelling.
Some of my next goals:
- Create an automated way to count my GitHub stars.
- Long term: Automate this entire snapshot and add it to my social homepage
- YouTube Partner Status
- Twitch Affiliate Status
- Publish another academic paper
- Exceed 50,000 TikTok followers to break out of Micro-Influencer Status