Background to 2022

I’ve only ever sent these on Facebook but this year, after some challenges, I wanted to make sure I covered anyone who supports my sites via one channel whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter or direct from a subscription to my website.  All of the outlets above have kept my viewing figures high, I guess I can’t complain about a 2022 total of around 270,000 blog hits and hitting the milestone of 2 million blog hits in early November – that was a major boost.  It takes 3-4 years to get a million hits based on current performance. 

This has been a challenging year, mainly because the pandemic had some impact on my social media activity and also in terms of growth.  2020 and 2021 were slower than normal but 2022 has seen some pickup.  At the time of writing my annual blog figures are higher than in 2021 so hopefully a reversal of the downward trend seen during the pandemic.  Some of it is due to less writing but much is due to a change in Facebook algorithms which affected many ‘pages’ reducing their scope (the more cynical might say it was done to drive advertising revenue but …….).   My page “Neuroendocrine Cancer” was badly hit by this algorithm change but things are slowly improving. There is a long way to go still as I can’t work out whether the page is less supported, or the algorithm doesn’t work for the current content.  Using Facebook ads to improve hits has turned out to be hit-and-miss. I’m reviewing that.  Running my “Ronny Allan” Facebook page takes a lot of effort, but I get a lot of satisfaction from doing it. My new awareness page World Neuroendocrine Cancer Day is growing steadily. 

One of my biggest challenges was managing my private Facebook group – this is a big draw on my time and something I didn’t have in the first few years of my blog.  I get busier as it gets bigger. With almost 8000 members, it is now the biggest Neuroendocrine Cancer Facebook group in the world.  That was not my mission, it just happened!