A lovely photo for your delight. I love the sense of motion in it.
Dave Beckerman originally shared this post:
Cartier Bresson in the 21st Century
#streetphotography-color-dlb
Union Square, 2011
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A lovely photo for your delight. I love the sense of motion in it.
Dave Beckerman originally shared this post:
Cartier Bresson in the 21st Century
#streetphotography-color-dlb
Union Square, 2011
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!
Pinterest has rolled out Pinterest Analytics. To add it to your site in order to see what’s getting pinned, you need to verify your site. Here’s the instructions for doing so.
Pinterest Analytics
Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.
I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.
Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:
Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.
Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.
Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.
Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.
Factors that might have affected those numbers:
The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.
And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.
So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.
Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.
Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?
Recent Social Media Links of Interest:
WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.
Facebook Changes: Facebook’s redesigned their news feeds. What are they and how do they affect reaching readers? Facebook’s also acquired storytelling social network Storylane.
Twitter: A guide to some Twitterspeak, some instances of which I’m not convinced are actually used by anyone.
On the tools side of things, I’ve been messing with Followerwonk. I’ll write that up next week.
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Some of you have two weeks left to sub to She Walks in Shadows. All woman Lovecraft antho, pays 6 cents a word (pro rate). Guidelines.
Good piece about science-fiction writer Nnedi Okarafor on BookRiot. “I came to her work at a time when the debate about a woman’s place in the world of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction was getting a lot of buzz. I realized that I’d read a few of the women who’d made their mark in that realm ““ Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jo Walton- but I felt as though I hadn’t gone far enough. Okorafor’s stories have encouraged me to travel further down that path.”
Interested in a writer’s retreat? Here’s a pretty good list of them.
Ray Bradbury talks about creativity and how our motives shape our writing. On the same site, Umberto Eco talks about the pleasures of maps of imaginary places.
What happens in your head while you’re reading? Your brain on stories.
David Cronenburg is interviewed about his process of novel writing, as well as finding beauty in unlikely corners. “There are many realities we need to ignore in order to function. Whenever we’re reminded of that, however obliquely, it is very disturbing””there’s a real dissonance that’s happening there. But of course it’s part of the function of art to keep that dissonance happening.”
An article with a lot of resonance for the self-pub versus traditional publishing argument about day jobs, found via M.C.A. Hogarth.
In The Atlantic, Jeff VanderMeer talks about the uncanny power of weird fiction.
Great piece about writers and their real influences, the things that shape their writing.. “I have a theory: the thing that makes you a unique writer hasn’t got so much to do with your influences as it does with how you became a writer in the first place. I think your preferences””your obsessions””come just as much from the first sorts of things you consumed and were passionate about. Whether that’s pop music, comics, “lowbrow” fiction, soap operas, or anything else, the thing that matters most is what started you writing stories.”
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