Since I heard it would be a required part of the course, I had always though of doing my niche blog on devolved politics. I’m generally interested in the topic after studying it in my first degree, and originally my plan was to set up a blog covering Scottish politics. Being based in Wales, this presents obvious problems.
Luckily two other chaps on the course, David Baxter and Damian Fantato were interested in devolved politics. We decided a collaborative blog on devolution in the UK in general would be the best way forward.
We settled on the name Theory of Devolution after toying around with Crossing the Severn. The former has better SEO qualities, and the latter misses out on the Scottish and Northern Irish angle.
A major landmark was the day we first started getting traffic from Google searches. Before that point we either didn’t have content people were searching for or missed out on Google searches due to being too new. With lots of search terms like ‘theory of devolution explanation’ I suspect much of our traffic came from politics students looking into the topic.
As our blogging went on we got more hits from searches for keywords in our posts rather than the name of the blog itself. I’d say we were pretty astute with our post tagging, looking back through the posts now there doesn’t appear to be any huge oversights.
Twitter was another great tool. It was too our regret that the Twitter handle @theoryofdevolution was too long, we had to settle for one which made us sound like we were over-analysing the 70s band Devo.
Like minded Twitter users didn’t immediately stumble across us. One of our earliest followers was @devolutionmag, a heavy metal magazine who had little apparent interest in constitutional politics.
It took longer than I expected to build up a decent following on Twitter. Despite the efforts of three people going into @theoryofdevo, it never reached the number of followers on my personal Twitter.
All said I think promotion from our individual Twitter accounts had a greater effect than @theoryofdevo, though as I don’t know which part of Twitter links to us I don’t have the specific stats to support this.
As a referrer, Facebook was perhaps just a whisker ahead of Twitter. The issue I mentioned above was still present on this social network, our Facebook page has 39 people liking it. Again, I cannot be sure, but I suspect our personal wallposts and status updates had more of an impact than this.
An unexpectedly rich vein of hits came from a post on the politics of Belgium. This post on Belgium’s protracted post-election negotiations was one of our most successful in terms of search engine traffic. This may be due to a lack of posts covering the topic in English or the fact the issue had largely been ignored by the UK’s mainstream media and blogosphere.
Our most successful day, with 117 hits, was Tuesday, December 7 2010. This was in part due to the Belgian boost, but also our posts on various political forums which essentially advertised the blog. These would often generate a flurry of hits initially, but since our forum visits were merely introductory they rarely lasted.
Being added to the blogroll of prominent SNP blogger Lallands Peat Worrier was also useful. Since his blog included a sidebar with the latest posts from bloggers on his blogroll, the more we posted, the more traffic we got from his site. Our description of him as ‘Occasionally bemusing’ still sits on his site’s front page, bloggers obviously respond to flattery! We didn’t have much luck in provoking responses from some of the key bloggers we identified at the start of the process.
Though when discussing traffic, we always bore in mind the effect of other CJS students following us. All 90 odd members of our diploma tend to follow each other, and when we post links on Twitter on Facebook, a good number of clickthroughs will come from people sitting a few computers away. That is hardly audience engagement of the type we were going for.
Overall, we should have been more proactive in engaging with our audience. We should have posted more on forums, engaged in more debates on Twitter, commented on other blogs and posted links on Facebook. We got results when we did this, but rarely kept it up.
Our use of multimedia was relatively good, though I did not find our video interviews (which included BBC Welsh political editor Betsan Powys and Peter Black AM) producing radically more hits than non-video posts.
In terms of the actual process of shooting and editing video, our technique definitely improved from post to post.
As we became distracted by coursework and other issues involvement, posts and, unsurprisingly, our hits went way down. Despite a few posts in January, in 2011 Theory of Devolution is a rump of its former self. Oddly, we seem to be ticking by with four or five hits a day.
We intend to continue with Theory of Devolution after this assessment for as long as possible. As a brand it sounds relatively solid and authoritive, and covers quite a broad range of topics. It’s been enjoyable and informative to contribute to it, and I’m sure the blog has a lot more life in it yet.
ToD’s interview with Betsan Powys.
