And so we wind down another year.
It’s difficult to summarize 2016. It was hard in many ways, but in so many other ways, really wonderful. Personally, I had some amazing experiences in 2016, got to travel, wrote a cookbook, had a great year financially. But as for the world… the world seems like it’s in a bit of a rough place right now.
For social media, it was a year with a lot of upheaval. It seems like every time I turned around, Instagram was updating its app, and those changes, while annoying on one level, have been leading to accelerated growth on the platform. Instagram just passed 600 Million active monthly users.
For Twitter, the year was not so good. In a tough spot financially, Twitter had to choose between saving Vine and saving Periscope, and they chose Periscope. Vine has been sent to the scrapheap in the sky. Twitter saw 60% of its top executives leaving, never a good sign.
We also lost Blab, and Meercat.
Live streaming, though, remains strong and 2017 will likely be the year it tips into the mainstream.
As for me, and my li’l ol blog?
I finally got around to that redesign I was putting off and so badly needed.
Here’s what my 2016 looked like here at RebeccaColeman.ca:
Number of views: 103,704 (up about 30% from 2015)
Visitors: 82,269 (up about 40% from 2015)
In 2016, I published 85 blog posts, bringing my all-time total up to 987… still not quite at 1,000 like I thought I would be at this time last year.
And here are my top posts for 2016:
The Instagram Algorithm; What You Need to Know. Instagram instituted an algorithm this year, and while it’s a black-box algorithm that we really know little about, I made some educated guesses.
Should You Use Buffer to Post to Facebook? One of my all-time best trafficked blog posts here is Why You Shouldn’t Use Hootsuite to Post to Your Facebook Page. I was curious; what if I repeated the experiment, but used Buffer instead? The results weren’t shocking to me.
SEO in 2016. My very first post of 2016 was an interview with my friend Paul, who is very nerdy about SEO. It’s a great interview, packed with tons of great tips.
Using Bots to Grow Your Instagram. I did an experiment where I used a bot to see if it would grow my Instagram following. The results might surprise you…
Vancouver’s Top Foodie Instagrammers. Some are my friends, some are ones I just follow and drool over, but I put together a list of what I think are the best Foodie Instagrammers in the city.
Why I’m Quitting Periscope. I was done, done, done. I had some really terrible experiences on Periscope, and I quit it in June. No regrets. I use Facebook Live instead.
2 Apps to Take your Instagram to the Next Level. Grrr. I loved Grama. Both it and Hashtap are now defunct, and my search to find something of the same level to replace them has been futile. If you find a good Instagram hashtag app, let me know, willya?
See a trend? More than half of those top 7 posts were related to Instagram. Instagram and Live Streaming really were the big winners this year. What will 2017 bring? There’s only one way to find out…
Happy New Year, friends.
