STATS : — like “likes”? Or are they more than that?
I am new to Medium, and am gradually learning to use various functions they have ingeniously put into this interactive website.
Being a Facebook mutineer, to some extent, (after all my family are all there so I can’t really leave), and a LinkedIn deserter because of the tendency for the interchanges to be so increasingly…um, rotten to the core… I am realizing that I have a “thing” about “LIKE”s.
I understand the psychological need for a writer or artist to succeed, and how will they gauge success except by readership or popularity? Or sales?
Reading statistics has always carried a caveat for the layperson. Find out what they REALLY mean, and whether they are using all the data to produce a chart or bottom line. Published stats are as reliable as advertising unless they come from reliable data.
Medium.com has this drop down menu from a member’s profile photo that gives quite a fascinating report on what’s what with one’s published writings.
It can be used, for sure for a pat on the back or a kick in the pants. What a writer does with that assessment depends on what it takes to “be okay”, a la Transactional Analysis terminology.
But, though I admit to checking stats to see how my latest post is doing among my teeny list of followers (did he like it, did she like it?) I have found other useful patterns that are not so much atta-girls stuff, but are also a sort of critique on presentation.
If people are inclined to read my stuff, why do they choose this and not that? As I say, I am new to this. But I have a vested interest in our The Story Hall project here at Medium:
I very much want it to be the happy home we ex-Cowbirders were longing for when our previous platform closed down.
I discovered that Titles make a difference. A so-so title can camouflage a truly wonderful essay or poem. Lackluster presentation can be a stumbling block right in the way of a front door to something that could be a real treasure of a written piece.
Case in point: My title The Mercury Station Wagon attracted exactly 0 for a day or so. Even so, the person who opened and read it first was one of us Cowbirders who are following our old Cowbird friends out of curiosity and friendship as much as searching for something exciting to read. We are building something here and want it to succeed. So we encourage one another. Even those with humdrum titles!!
When I changed the title to : The Mercury Station Wagon and the 4 Year Old Driver I got readers almost immediately. Literature 101, isn’t it? And, in a sense, a lesson in marketing, or making your offering attractive.
Clicking around on the Stats pages will help… like a creative writing class (or refresher) it will give guidance, I feel sure, about our work and how it’s developing. What a grand thing it is to find someone who is not historically one of us Cowbirders who has found my story by virtue of the title, without the other biases.
Just the musings of a newbie here with a new kind of stats to parse out. We can trust these! They are based on our own input!
