Reviewing my activities for 2018

Roughly five months ago I began this journey of being more social, and being more forthcoming with what I have learned and achieved over my years in IT. I am also a big fan of data and statistics. So as we near the end of this year, lets have a look to see if things have improved and where to from here.

What I started with

We are starting this review with my very first post on this site in July 2018. At that point I had:

• A modest LinkedIn profile - 180 Connections - 17 views over 90 days
• A small Twitter profile - 25 Followers - 2 Tweets in 30 days - 260 Impressions
• No GitHub presence - Empty
• A small traffic Website - 16 Users in 30 Days

Fairly small, so lets have a quick look at that statistics now before delving into what I have done with each item.

• My LinkedIn profile - 194 Connections - 29 views over 90 days - 143 Post views
• My Twitter profile - 96 Followers - 76 Tweets in 30 days - 30,200 Impressions - 375 Profile Visits
• My GitHub presence - 1 Repository with an additional contribute
• My Website - 72 Users and 142 Sessions over the last 30 days

So as you can see, it is starting to increase slowly, lets have a look at what I have been doing.

Twitter

Twitter has probably been the biggest change for me, and while a fair few of these tweets have been discussions driven by University classes and work, a fair few have been IT related as well. As you can see, most of my tweet activity hovers still pretty low, normally around the 500 impressions mark if I use an appropriate hash tag. I am relatively happy with that to be honest, but as I keep improving I’ll look to increase that over the next year.

You can see from the statistics as well that there is a large blip in the middle of the 30 days. That was a bit of an anomaly where I posted the following tweet after reading Scott Hanselman’s (A .Net developer I follow) blog post which he re-tweeted.

Most of this action was because I tagged Scott in the Twitter post. This was quite effective and will have to do this on occasion again when I read interesting articles as it benefits me from a getting views perspective and benefits him from an independent verification of his work perspective. Like everything though I am only going to do this if I find the content compelling. Too much of this would feel a bit wrong and I think lose its value.

LinkedIn

I haven’t particularly focused on my LinkedIn presence at this stage, I have mainly just improved my summary and my work history to better surface myself on that platform. For next year I think I will start cross posting more of my technical work that I write about on my blog. I view LinkedIn as more of a “this is my paid work history” platform and I’ll need to change that next year.

My Website and Blog

My website and blog is really starting to come along even for the limited work I have done with it. I get a few visitors each day which is pretty cool in my limited scope so I’m really trying to nail down a posting schedule. Part of the concern I have with my blog is that I really have a tendency to craft every single sentence of every post and I think I am hoping experience writing in this form will help address that.

I also have a few ideas to increase the scope of my blog and also start a secondary web and blog site that I can use to focus on some subjects that aren’t particularly focused around what I do, mainly storytelling and video games. I also need to look at me retention and the pages people access to craft better content.

Goals for next year

As mentioned there throughout this post there are a number of goals for the next 12 months. These are:

• Get into a better habit with Twitter and increase my post count a bit more
• Try to actively push my Twitter account to increase my follow count
• Get into a better blog writing habit, aiming for weekly blog posts and be more structured with my writing
• Launch my secondary site after University finishes to focus on some of my other interests - story telling and video games
• Start posting my more work related content onto LinkedIn as a platform
• Look at producing content that others can use, such as code and tutorials