During the 2017 General Election Facebook virality made me the most shared political writer of the entire election campaign. Three of my articles achieved over a million hits each (the #1, #2, and #7 most shared articles of the entire campaign), and almost all the other articles easily passed 100,000.
These days AAV has been tuned down so much that it's a rarity when one of my increasingly rare blog posts beats 10,000 hits, which equates to a 90%+ collapse in visibility since 2017, despite my follower count continuing to rise slightly.
The Facebook algorithm has basically made AAV invisible to 97% of the people who follow the page, including many thousands who have explicitly asked for AAV to be prioritised in their feed via the "see first" option.
I've basically got no choice at this point but to try to diversify my social media presence, and creating a new AAV Substack seems like the logical pace to start.
Substack is like a blog host, social media account, fundraiser, and mailing list all rolled into one.
The main benefit is that there is no dodgy social media censorship algorithm between me and my Substack audience, deciding on their behalf that the majority of them no longer want to to see any of my content.
If you follow me on there, you'll get notifications every time I put up a new post, unless you decide to unsubscribe for yourself.
I'll aim to do around five posts per week to begin with to avoid overwhelming people with too much stuff.
I'll continue posting things on Facebook too, because I still have a huge audience there. But the new plan is to try to build Substack up as a kind of "inner circle" for my most supportive and enthusiastic readers.
I fully expect the majority of Substack subscribers to choose the free option, but if you can afford to sign up for a paid subscription you will be really helping me out enormously, and supporting me to keep producing more content.
Here's the link:
Another Angry Voice on Substack
Thanks everyone,
Tom (Another Angry Voice)