My year on social media - Facebook
This is my first time posting to Dreamwidth! Hopefully it will also crosspost to Livejournal seamlessly.
Facebook has increasingly become my most used channel of interaction online. Most of my content is not expecially original - I repost links to a lot of articles, and to my own Livejournal entries (now Dreamwidth), and sometimes I repost pictures that I have found on Twitter or Instagram.
My most shared Facebook post of the year was a case in point - a fun picture of Bill and Hillary Clinton as students, that I probably saw on Twitter, saved to my phone and posted to Facebook. It clearly hist the Zeitgeist, three weeks before the election. My own posting got 492 likes (fourth highest for any of my 2016 post)s, of which I thnk fewer than half were from friends of mine; and it was shared an astonishing 5,521 times. I checked, and these were definitly all reflections of my original post. I just wish it had been my original material!
My most liked Facebook post of 2016, also the second most widely shared, was original content: my last-minute plea to British voters to vote Remain in the referendum on EU membership (also posted to LiveJournal, and mailed to about 1300 people who I knew living in the UK). Obviously it did not have the desired effect, but there was little else I could do, and I am glad I did it. The 522 shares indicate that it went far and wide.
My most commented-on Facebook post of 2016, also the second most liked, was also original content, but very much shorter. Facebook has become an important channel of letting people know that you have survived whatever disaster may have happened in your town. On the morning of 22 March, unusually, I drove into work (I normally take the train), and even more unusually, my phone was not working and I was effectively out of contact for the two hours between leaving home at 8.30 and arriving at the office through inexplicably apocalyptic traffic at 1030. Once I arrived, I discovered that two bomb attacks in Brussels had killed dozens, and posted this announcement as soon as I had made the most urgent phone calls to my family.
I'm still alive and well, and now posting to Dreamwidth.
I've switched my primary blog to Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there, but I will see it more quickly there.