Recently, former President Donald Trump launched a blog on his personal website — and according to social media engagement data reported on by NBC this week, it’s not going great. In short, the blog has so far had dramatically lower reach than the reach that his posts on Twitter and elsewhere had on a regular basis. Trump was removed from major social media platforms after he incited violence at the Capitol in January, where a mob of his supporters stormed the building under the explicit pretense of his lies about the integrity of last year’s election.
The social media engagement data that NBC shared was partly “compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company,” the outlet explains. Notably, Trump’s blog itself doesn’t foster a whole lot of engagement, because there’s no option on the site to comment on posts or otherwise engage with the material, meaning that engagement opportunities are limited to sharing and discussing the posts on other platforms, which is what NBC examined. According to NBC, Trump’s blog “has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit” — and that’s it. Trump previously had tens of millions of followers on Twitter alone.
NBC also shared data for screenshots on social media platforms of Trump’s blog posts, revealing that for each statement from the former president on his blog, there are an average of just a few thousand screenshots of the post across established social media sites. Thus, direct links to and screenshots of the material on the blog both remain low.
Notably, Trump has lauded his post-Twitter ban practice of issuing public statements instead of social media posts, referring to the remarks as “elegant” — which is laughable, since he seems to be acting as though he’s in any way an authority on what’s “elegant” or not. When he was on social media, his posts were consistently defined by staggeringly petty crudity. Now, Twitter is apparently doing just fine without him — in the first quarter of 2021, the company’s gross revenue grew by 28 percent compared to the first quarter of 2020. Net income for the quarter also grew, standing at $68 million, a stark contrast from the $8.4 million loss the company posted in the first quarter of 2020.
