A bit on the #fediverse, and why independent websites the create content really should be participating on this social media platform. Warning - this will be a long post.
Our website, CoffeeGeek.com has enjoyed a lot of traffic growth over the past six months. That growth has come from
a large increase in our normal content production
making our website much more mobile friendly with a big redesign, launched in March
my participation in a very active way here in the fediverse.
The third one is no small deal either. I am a bit obsessed with metrics and such, and since we don’t really have much in the way of goog/meta trackers on CoffeeGeek, we put a few of our own metric-following bits and bobbles, and we get a noticeable visit count increase of real folks (not the infamous mastoddos everytime I post a url to our website), from fediverse-clicking people.
When I left the Tweeter platform last fall, a lot of thought went into where we would take our social media attention. We really looked at vastly increasing our Instagram use. At one point, I was ready to assign two of our blog contributors (who were gung ho for it) to take over the CoffeeGeek account there and post clickbaity type “you gotta see this” content, changing completely how I used to (and now continue to) post there.
But I didn’t want to be a slave to the algorithm. Plus there’s no sum gain for a creative content website like ours from Instagram, because we cannot post url links there easily.
I really like the core mission and ideals behind Mastodon and the fediverse, so I made the decision that a) all my attention would be on that platform (as far as social media involvement is concerned), b) I would post daily, and c) I would be very personal and hands on. No third party. Answer questions. Have polls, Interact. Do my best to be a good, active participant in the fediverse.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last six months now. This account went from 300 followers when I started in earnest in October, to 3.6K followers, all organic. Way more important than follower count is the interaction. I love and thrive on it, and all of you with almost no exceptions have been super welcoming and inviting. Even when I post the occasional rant.
Behind the scenes, I’m doing my darndest to get other independent content creators in the specialty coffee sphere to come onto this platform. So far, they have not, because most of them still rely on third party “social media ‘experts’” to manage and chart their social media involvement. Tweeter / IG / FB / Tiktok is where they’re being told they should be (no so much Tweeter any longer), but if CoffeeGeek is any kind of set example, and the dividends we’ve enjoyed are a metric, they are getting very bad advice from those experts.
Our site traffic doesn’t lie. Fediverse traffic is in the healthy single digits for our website, and it is higher than our numbers from Youtube, Facebook, or Instagram. In fact, it is coming close to being higher than those three combined.
If I was a shrewd businessperson (I am not), maybe I shouldn’t even post this. If I were 1000% cut throat capitalist, maybe I don’t even want other specialty coffee content producers to enjoy this kind of organic success. But I guess I’m not. Because what’s more important to me is sharing the passion and cultural richness of the world’s most complex food item, getting more and more people to know it, enjoy it, discuss it, and debate it. All this participation has the benefit of making specialty coffee better.
That was the mission statement I had when I launched CoffeeGeek.com back in 2001. It remains today.
I hope more and more independent content creators make the jump to this social media sphere. Both in specialty coffee, and in other areas of interest. Maybe they’ll somehow find this long post, and it will inspire them to do so.
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