Donald Trump's blog is not doing very well, according to data compiled by social media analytics companies. Light years from "completely redefining the game", Trump is fast becoming a non-entity online.
Social engagement around Trump — a measure of likes, reactions, comments or shares on content about him across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest — has nosedived 95 percent since he was permanently banned from Twitter in January, according to the Washington Post.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that nearly half of Trump voters (46%) say they have zero plans to read the posts from the former guy's little desk in Mar-A-Blogo.
Online talk about [Donald Trump] has plunged to a five-year low. He's banned or ignored on pretty much every major social media venue. In the last week, Trump's website — including his new blog, fundraising page and online storefront — attracted fewer estimated visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish. . . .
Social engagement around Trump — a measure of likes, reactions, comments or shares on content about him across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest — has nosedived 95 percent since January, to its lowest level since 2016 [according to data from four online-analytics firms]. . . .
His "From the Desk of Donald Trump" blog, which he and his team have promoted heavily in TV interviews and social media posts, has in the last week been shared to Facebook on average fewer than 2,000 times a day — a staggering drop from last year, when his Facebook page fielded tens of millions of comments, shares and other interactions every week . . .
Trump, who has long boasted about his ability to draw an audience online and dominate the conversation, has complained that his statements are getting nowhere near as much as attention as they once did, people in his orbit have said. . . .
In March, Trump's senior adviser, Jason Miller, said a new Trump social media platform would be revealed within three months and draw "tens of millions of people" to become "the hottest ticket" in social media.
"It's going to completely redefine the game," he said in a Fox News interview, "and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does."
Trump's team unveiled their new website this month by circulating a cinematic trailer, in which soaring orchestral music plays as the camera zooms from space into Mar-a-Lago over the words: "In a time of silence and lies, a beacon of freedom arises."
But even as they promoted it, Trump's advisers were underwhelmed. The long-hyped site was just a blog: a primitive one-way loudspeaker that lacked most of the technical features that define the modern Web, like the per-post comment sections that older blogging sites such as LiveJournal have had for 20 years. . . .Miller dismissed the drop in mentions on social media. "A lot of our people aren't on those platforms anymore. When they kicked off Trump, millions of Trump supporters are no longer on Twitter or Facebook having rejected these big tech oligarchs for their censoring of President Trump."
But there's no evidence that millions of Trump supporters have left those platforms. Facebook's daily active user base in the United States and Canada hasn't changed since Trump's ban . . . while Twitter's actually grew by 5 million, to 38 million, company filings show. . . .
Trump advisers say the blog is low-quality and unimpressive and have faulted Brad Parscale, the former Trump campaign manager whose company built the site . . . for several technical glitches and inexplicable delays. . . .Each blog post includes a Facebook and Twitter share button, allowing fans to spread Trump's words on networks where they would otherwise be banned. But not many fans appear to be doing so: Social engagement across the Web with Trump's blog, including reactions and shares on Facebook and Twitter, plummeted from 159,000 interactions on its first day to fewer than 30,000 the second and haven't crossed 15,000 interactions any day since, BuzzSumo data show.
Parscale insisted . . . the number of page views so far in May is 28 million . . .Trump's blog shows [no] technical sophistication . . . The blog does not save one's progress or previously read messages, and asks viewers every time they open the page whether they want alerts to their email and phone, regardless of whether they've already signed up.
To mimic a social network, each post includes a "heart" button, but it doesn't do anything except change the icon from blue to red . . . Some messages, like a recent 900-word rant about the New York attorney general's investigation of his company, are posted in a single giant, hard-to-read block.
The site prominently features buttons for donating to Trump's political action committee and buying Trump-branded merchandise. . . . The only photo on the site shows Trump sitting in a floral-patterned chair, writing in a book with a Sharpie. . . .
Trump claims he likes his blog "better than Twitter".
Is that why he tried (in vain) several times to sneak back onto Twitter? And I guess he also likes having his posts shared fewer than 700 times as opposed to 100,000 times because his main goal is always to avoid drawing attention to himself.
1 comment:
Social engagement around Trump — a measure of likes, reactions, comments or shares on content about him across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest — has nosedived 95 percent since he was permanently banned from Twitter in January, according to the Washington Post.
This is good news!
In 2010, there was a lot of blather about a "Twitter revolution" in Iran, supposedly proof of how social media could change the world. This was based on ignorance of how that dissidence actually grew in Iran -- i.e. based on western media's assumptions that were then passed around as fact.
Now I wonder if we've really seen a Twitter revolution (or an attempted one), in the attack on the US Capitol.
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