Review

In 2023, I managed to push beyond the 2022 totals, that was a major boost for me given December was a write off due to illnes. 

To be honest, I’m still flabbergasted by reaching one million views in 2018, and then reach 2 million in December 2020.  I’m a third of the way to 3 million at 1 Jan 2024. It just kinda happened, there wasn’t a plan!  It’s mindboggling.  I’m grateful for every single view though.

2023 was a challenging year, mainly because the pandemic continues to have some latent impact on my social media including in terms of growth.  2020 and 2021 were slower than normal, then 2022 saw some pickup, ditto on 2023 but slower then I would have liked despite writing more this year.  I can’t blame less writing like I did last year so perhaps I’m writing the wrong things!  That said, the Facebook algorithm does not help! A change in the Facebook page algorithms has affected many ‘pages’ reducing their scope …… the more cynical might say it was done to drive advertising revenue out of these ‘pages’ but Facebook misses the point that some pages are just trying to help others at no or little cost!    

Chris and I both succumbed to Covid in 2022 after dodging it since March 2020.  Read about my experience by clicking here.  2023 was looking good until I tested positive around 16th Dec (blog post to follow).  The impact of the pandemic also leaked into my surveillance scans and doctors are on the lookout for the effects of covid on surveillance scans causing imperfections on both nuclear PETs and CT.  Includes the after-effects of the infection. In my own case, both issues were found as the vaccine was causing reactive nodes to show, and after my infection, they spotted some ground glass opacity (GGO) on my lungs, a new phenomenon they now deal with. It was spotted on my annual surveillance CT and resulted in a repeat to check it was clearing up (it did).  Read about GGO here and for scan imperfections caused by vaccines, read here.  I’m worried my December 2023 infection will exacerbate the GGO problem, we shall see. 

My page “Neuroendocrine Cancer” was badly hit by the Facebook 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 (and the doing the travelling that supports it!).  I am using a slightly different type of page for this, so perhaps the algorithm is less sensitive or people just like the stuff I post there more than my standard blogs!  A work in progress to figure it all out. 

My new awareness page World Neuroendocrine Cancer Day is growing steadily and posts are often supported more than my much larger page.

Despite the difficulties above, I still managed 276,619 blog views in the year 2023, higher than in 2022.  The gap would have been bigger had I been able to work throughout my C-19 infection and did not go on holidays! 

If you’re reading this, best wishes for 2024 to you!