How to keep track of your Social Media Followers

Last year I made it my New Year Resolution to keep track of my social media followers. This was so I could (hopefully) see how my numbers have grown over the year. The tracking was really helpful. I used a spreadsheet which I shared on my blog for people to download and use too. I know lots of people found it helpful, so I’ve decided to re-work it and share it again.

In 2017, across all of my social media accounts I’ve managed to grow my following by a total of 5000. To me this is a really good number and I’m delighted. If I can do the same in 2018 I will be thrilled. Growing your numbers can be really hard work, keeping them engaged is probably harder though, but that’s a whole other blog post. We all already know that the key to social media success is the SOCIAL bit. But the best way to grow your numbers on social media is to always to engage and be engaging with your followers. It’s as simple and as hard work as that.

It would be easy to just change the date on my old spreadsheet and just re-share it, but as the year has gone on I’ve added a few elements and made it more fit for purpose. It’s still quite simple to use and I’ve included all the social media channels I use and can think of. If there’s one on there you don’t use, you can either delete that row or just put a zero in that box and it will ignore it. If I’ve missed any, please message me or leave a comment and I’ll update the spreadsheet.

I’ve set the spreadsheet up so that it will add up your numbers and give you a total number of followers. This will also appear in the chart below. I like seeing my numbers rising on a chart. I’m a very visual person, so a rising graph always pleases me.

Download my Social Media Tracking spreadsheet HERE.

One of the features I’ve added is a “To Go” column. This is entirely optional. This will show you how many more followers you need for each social network each month against your yearly target. You will need to change the code each month to make sure the sum is correct. If you’re not confident doing this then you can leave it out.

If you look at the spreadsheet you’ll see I’ve added an example number and target. The code =SUM(N4-B4) in the To Go column does the maths and tells us that with 50 followers and a target of 100 followers, you have 50 more followers to go. In February you’ll need to change the code in that box to =SUM(N4-C4) and so on each month. I added that column because I found it useful to see where I needed to have a bit of a social push in order to meet my target for the year.

I have also added an extra section underneath, which helps me keep track of the three things I was most interested in keeping a note of in 2017. For me these were my Domain Authority (DA), my total YouTube views and my Tots100 chart position. Obviously you can either delete that section or rename the rows so you can monitor whatever metrics you’re most interested in.

You might like to set yourself a target for the year. See how many followers you’ve got on New Years Day and then give yourself a target to work for. It could be an across the board total figure you’re working towards, or maybe you want to get to 10k followers on YouTube in 2018. Whatever your social media followers target for 2018, tracking your progress is the first step to success.

Let me know how you get on! Happy tracking!

How to add a StumbleUpon Sharing Button to your WordPress blog

Do you have a StumbleUpon Sharing Button on your blog? If not, you probably need one. It’s a great way for your readers to share your content and share the love.

A couple of years ago when I was setting up my blog I added the usual sharing buttons which would appear at the bottom of each blog post. Back then StumbleUpon was one of the standard buttons and I added it to the others not really knowing what it was. Of course these days blog posts are being Stumbled all over the place, and it’s a great way to pick up traffic.

Imagine my horror (not really horror, I might’ve tutted) when friend and blogger, Colette from We’re going on an adventure pointed out that my StumbleUpon sharing button wasn’t there and she had to manually Stumble my post.

My first port of call was to Google it. It appeared I was not alone in wondering what had happened to the StumbleUpon sharing button. It seems that the button used http which causes mixed-content warnings and sometimes fails completely on https sites. WordPress.com does not support http anymore and as StumbleUpon won’t move to https WordPress just did away with the button.

I knew it couldn’t be that hard to make a StumbleUpon button, so I figured it out so you don’t have to.

How to add a StumbleUpon Sharing Button to your WordPress blog

Go into your WordPress dashboard.
Go to Settings – Sharing.
Scroll down and click on “Add a new service”.
In the Service Name box type “StumbleUpon”.
In the Sharing URL box type – http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%
In the Icon URL box add the following code – https://hodgepodgedays.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/tiny-stumble.png
Click on “Create Share Button”, the button should appear, then you just drag it down to the “Enabled Services” section.

Your StumbleUpon sharing button should now be working perfectly.

The icon URL will depend on what you which icon you want to use. I just used the standard StumbleUpon icon and resized it to 16px by 16px, uploaded it to my media library and used the URL from that (which I posted above, you’re free to use my URL or upload and use your own).

Got it? Clear as mud? It’s easy, seriously if I can figure it out you’ll be fine. Feel free to ask me if you get stuck (you won’t).

Now go forth and Stumble, hopefully starting with this blog post (hint).

Click here for more blogging tutorials.

Parenting: Why I won’t shame my son online

Yesterday my over-tired 4 year old spent most of the afternoon screaming and crying. He was in a foul mood and was really hard to be around. Together my husband and I spent the long hours until bedtime tagteaming him. Trying to gently entertain him, soothe him and keep him happy. He was hard work, and we felt every second of those six hellish tantrummy hours we endured before he went to bed.

But you know what. I didn’t bitch about him to a soul. I didn’t go on Twitter and call him a dick and do the old #freetoagoodhome hashtag. There was no *sad face* Facebook status update and I didn’t Instagram him mid-meltdown. I didn’t shame him online because I have so much respect for this little human being I carried around, birthed and have lovingly nurtured up to this point.

We all use social media to vent. I know this because I vent all over it. Sometimes it feels like it would help to post a little ranty status update about the little person who loves you unconditionally and relies on you for 100% of their care and attention. I get it. I couldn’t tell you if I’ve ever publicly been a bit nasty about my own child, I might’ve been, but it seems quite unlike me. I’m not in the shame business.

Parenting is bloody hard. Bloody hard. You’re knackered. All. The. Time. You lack the freedom you had pre-children, you can’t do what you want, when you want. Money is tight, there is rainbow covered crap all over your once tastefully decorated house and you have to take a personal interest in the bowel movements of another human. It is hard and it is gross. I get it.

I won’t shame my son online.

We’ve all seen those “reasons my son is crying” memes. The ones where it says “he’s crying because I wouldn’t let him lick fire” and stuff like that. There was a counter meme which struck a chord with me. My son is crying because he’s tried. He’s crying because he’s confused by what’s going on. My son is crying because he has no frame of reference for this new experience he’s having and is clearly terrified of. Yes. Nailed it.

My child is not being difficult just to piss me off, or stop me watching my favourite TV programme. He is crying and being difficult because for him life is all new, confusing, difficult, stressful, whatever. My son doesn’t need me losing my temper with him for this. He doesn’t need me to shame him online. He needs me to understand that having a tantrum, for most of the time at the very least, is evidence of the gap between his existing skills, experience and knowledge and what is happening to him right here, right now.

What he doesn’t need is to look back when he’s old enough, scroll through my tweets or Facebook posts and see for himself how hateful I was towards him. Parenting isn’t easy, I don’t think I ever gloss over it. When I started blogging it was in a way an online diary which we could look back on as a family, or when I’m gone, warty bits and all.

It goes back to the old saying “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. Be real, be honest, be truthful, but don’t be a dick. After all, this child you’re bitching about now will be picking out your retirement home soon enough. Parenting is hard, but the actual child rearing bit is comparatively short and they’ll be off to uni before you know it. It’s hard, but temporary. So be nice.

Parenting: Why I won't shame my son online — I love that boys face, and I’ve grown to love all the rainbow coloured crap that moved in when he did.

You can read more of my posts about parenting here.

I had a Twitter copycat

A funny thing happened to me over the weekend. In an idle moment I went to search my Twitter username “HodgePodgeDays“, it’s something I do occasionally just to see if anything comes up that I haven’t been directly @’d in. As I got to the end of the username another account flashed up with my logo, so I clicked on it and found my account had been cloned. They’d stolen my logo, the background which includes a picture of my four year old son and my bio which reads “Lifestyle & Parent Blogger, Copywriter, Writer for Hire & Occasional PR”, and my Twitter name was almost identical, with just a couple of the letters transposed – I was livid!

Naturally I had a bit of a panic. Who would do this and why? For what nefarious reason have they done this? Some suggested it was to blag “free” things from PRs using a similar name, maybe it was to send spam to people, maybe there was another reason. I’ll never really find out. I’ve spent over two years building my Twitter profile, making friends and establishing myself as a blogger and they were attempting to capitalise on this. I was angry.

I checked out the Twitter support page and filled out a report, citing that someone was impersonating my account. They sent me back this email…

Before Twitter would even look at my report they needed government issued photo ID and evidence that HodgePodgeDays was me. It seemed a bit of a faff, but I sent them a copy of my passport, a screenshot of my blog dashboard, a screenshot of my domain registration, a screenshot of the copycat account and a screenshot of my Twitter account. I sent this off on Sunday afternoon as requested.

I then spent several days checking occasionally to see if the copycat account was still there. It was. The bloggers in the North West Bloggers group were brilliant, some reported the account as spam, I think most checked to see if they’d been copied too, a few found that they had and reported it to Twitter too.

Twitter had given me a report number, but for the life of me I couldn’t find a way to check the status of my report – which I think is a bit of a flaw in the system. In the meantime friends continued to report the account on my behalf as spam and I began to lose what little faith I had in Twitter to do the right thing.

This afternoon I finally got an email from Twitter, they’d suspended the account, specifically for being a spam account, which seems a bit odd, but at least it’s been removed.

Going forward I’m going to be more aware that this kind of thing happens, I never really expected it to happen to me. I think it’s made me more aware and I’ll be looking out for copycat accounts on behalf of my fellow bloggers from now on.

It was a faff and a worry, but hopefully that’s the last of it. Keep your eyes peeled folks – there’s a copycat about!

Is it worth paying to promote your posts on Facebook?

Back in March this year I conduced a little experiment with Facebook. Dear old Facebook had been imploring me for months to try paying to “boost my posts”. I have a little over 2000 people who like my Facebook page and routinely everything I post on these gets very little attention, this is largely due to the algorithms Facebook uses to limit the content people liking pages will see and also to encourage page owners to put their hand in their pocket.

I was running a lovely little competition to win a limited edition print of a cartoon, it was a great prize but for some reason my competition wasn’t as popular as I hoped it would be. I looked at the stats on Facebook, it had been shared to only 67 people out of around 2000 followers. That’s pretty depressing. So I decided to see if paying for Facebook advertising was really worth it.

I paid £3 to boost my post over three days, ok so that is pretty cheap, but I didn’t want to go in high and waste my money.

The Facebook advertising ran for 3 days and apparently over those three days paying for it meant that it showed up a fairly impressive 1,152 times in peoples timelines. Am I impressed though? No. Why not? I hear you ask, well firstly it showed up in my own timeline several times each day, which just felt a little spammy for my liking, and it was my post!

Also, I’m not convinced by the accuracy of their stats which seemed to suddenly rocket in the final hours of day three, so I suspected a bit of creative accounting had taken place to make the Facebook advertising seem more effectual than it actually was, though I can’t prove it, it’s just a hunch.

What else didn’t float my boat? Well my advert had 1,219 “impressions” in total and it only had 7 clicks. Firstly the idea of impressions makes me mad, I don’t really want Facebook to show the same thing to the same person 10 times, I want more people to see it once, twice tops. And 7 clicks? Really? I suspect at least half of those were before I’d boosted the post in the first place.

My rationale for boosting my post and buying some Facebook advertising was to generate additional clicks on the link and more entries into the competition I was hosting. I wasn’t looking to increase my page likes, but that would’ve been nice too. Generating just 7 clicks and no engagement or interaction was beyond disappointing.

My conclusion: I paid £3 for 7 clicks to my blog which seems pretty darn expensive. I also felt like Facebook had maybe spammed some people on my behalf, which could potentially lead them to unfollow or unlike my page, which is the very opposite of what you want to happen. Would I boost a post again? It’s unlikely. Unless they iron out the spaminess, sort out the accuracy of their statistics and do something to improve click throughs etc, it’s probably just a big old waste of my money.

Have you used Facebook advertising? Have you had great success and have I just been unlucky?

How I made Twitter less annoying

I’ve been on twitter for over five years now, I’ve previously blogged that it’s been a life saver to me. It’s a social network with the emphasis on SOCIAL. I’ve made more true friends on there than I dare to count, it’s fabulous, but it’s also pretty annoying at times.

It’s the Internet, so you do get complete loonies, perverts and trolls, usually I wear my big girl pants and deal with these pretty well, by rising above it; throwing a snarky tweet at them; having a whinge or just plain blocking them. Blocking is always a last resort for me, so if I’ve blocked you, you really have crossed a line that can never be uncrossed.

A few weeks ago I updated the twitter app on my iPad and it finally gave me the feature I’ve been waiting for, the ability to mute people. Why not just unfollow or block them you ask, I don’t want to, maybe I like the person but not their constant rubbish tweets, maybe I still want to tweet with them but I don’t want them clogging my timeline all the time. The twitter mute button has massively changed my experience for the better.

I have a three strikes and you’re out policy when it comes to twitter, this is a new thing, made up by me, but it works.

Step one: you’re annoying me, I make a mental note that this is your first warning. You might be tweeting annoying stuff, too many selfies, lots of retweets about the same thing, maybe you tweet every single detail of your monotonous day without irony or humour. Any of those (and more) can put you on a warning.

Step two: oh you’ve done it, you’ve irritated me again with your stupid retweets. I immediately turn off your retweets, I no longer have to see every single retweet you do about sausages, street food, football bantz or “inspirational” quotes, this may or may not be your salvation. It’s worth noting at this stage that retweeting praise and #FFs may also put you in this category. It’s also worth noting that I sometimes do those things too, but I usually put myself on the naughty step and consider what I’ve done.

Step three: agh! I’ve snapped, I cannot tolerate you on my timeline anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve waved my finger over that twitter mute button two or three times by now, this wasn’t an easy decision to make, but take solace in the fact you’ve been muted and not unfollowed or blocked, we’re still friends, it’s just that I don’t want to see or hear you and your stupid whiny voice ever again.

It’s like I’ve reclaimed my timeline, I can check twitter safe in the knowledge that I won’t be seeing whole rafts of annoying tweets from the same few accounts, it’s a delight. I never, ever fell out of love with twitter, but I did sometimes avoid it to stop me getting annoyed. So if twitter is getting you down, why not try my handy three step plan, it’s saving my social media sanity on a daily basis.