Week 12 progress update

I started the week experimenting with Social Media. I took the video I shared on Twitter last week and shared it on TikTok, YouTube (as a short) and Instagram. I got very different outcomes. It was interesting to see how each site responded to my video, but also incredibly distracting. I found myself frequently checking the view count and analytics. Next time I push a video, I’ll have to force myself to wait 24h before going back to it in any way.

Well, here is a summary:

TikTok: I was surprised to see my video surpassing 800 views on TikTok, with more than 170 likes. This was unexpected, TBH. Publishing the video on Monday morning, I thought it would go unnoticed. On the other hand, I was disappointed by the analytics. It looks like most of these people liked the video without watching much of it. Also, after 24h the views dropped to almost zero. I guess this is normal with most TikTok videos: the same happened for the previous video I posted.

YouTube: As a YouTube short, the video got 120 views and 2 likes. I am sure retention was also pretty poor when I checked yesterday (something like 20-30% average percentage viewed), although today it looks totally different (it is now 152%). I am not sure how much this figure can be trusted, as the data seems to refer to the whole video lifetime. Maybe one person left their browser open on the video in loop-mode for 24h and this counted as 10000% percentage watched, which gives 152% when averaged across all users? No idea!

Instagram: I got almost no views from this social media. 13 views after 24h. Most of them are from people that follow me. They aren’t many, as I created the account a short time back and I haven’t used it much. TBH, the same holds for YouTube and TikTok. These are accounts I created to share the work I am doing on the relativistic game.

Twitter: I got the usual ~100 impressions. However, I got a higher level of engagement than what I got from previous posts. Currently the stats read: 180 impressions, 34 engagements, 5 detail expands, 2 profile visits, 126 views, 31 unique views. Again, audience retention is very poor. However, as the unique views are 31 (of 126), I suspect most of the views may come from me while opening the Twitter app, which would then skew the retention. Well, I hope that this is the case. If the retention refers to unique views, then I can conclude nobody watched the video till the end.

Well, I haven’t invested much time in creating this video. TBH, I posted it to TikTok only to be able to embed the video from this post. After playing a bit with it, I decided to use YouTube instead, as TikTok overlays the video with a lot of extra stuff I don’t like and don’t want on my site. After seeing the unexpected "success" in TikTok, I also posted it in Instagram, as an experiment.

Enough about this. I may capture more details in a separate post.

Apart from tinkering with Social Media, this week I wrote and added a new post about Length contraction of light pulses to relativisticgame.net. I spent most of the remaining time animating the Train-Tunnel paradox video. This is the main objective I have for now and it is good I am making progress with it, although - as I said at the beginning of this post - I wish I kept more focus on it and lost less time watching view counts on Social Media.