Mar-A-Blogo: Trump losing blog wars
The ex-president’s blog has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts
New data revealed that former US president Donald Trump's new blog is failing to find an audience.
Trump's blog is stuggling to find an audience even among his supporters, reports the MSNBC.
Four months after Trump was banished from most mainstream social media platforms, he returned to the web earlier this month with "From the Desk of Donald J Trump," essentially a blog for his musings.
The ex-president's blog has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts, according to engagement data compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company. The data offers a hint that while Trump remains a political force, his online footprint is still dependent on returning to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The Desk of Donald J Trump is limited — users can't comment or engage with the actual posts beyond sharing them to other platforms, an action few people do, according to the data.
Trump's new blog has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before the ban, a single Trump tweet was typically liked and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times.
The blog posts come in the form of statements that are also sent to supporters via email. In the multiple daily notes, Trump has attacked his political enemies and endorsed faithful supporters, continued to push false claims and conspiracy theories, and opined on news of the day.
Trump's bans cost him the ability to communicate with millions of people: 88 million followers on Twitter, 32 million on Facebook, and 24 million on Instagram. Trump had just around 3 million YouTube subscribers, but his videos regularly racked up millions of views.
A CNBC analysis of Trump's tweets in January found his most-liked tweets spread disinformation. But the conspiracy theories and name-calling that the former president has spread via his blog don't seem to move the way they did when Trump benefited from the dual platforms of the White House and traditional social media.
Trump has called his statements a "more elegant" alternative to tweeting, telling Newsmax's Greg Kelly in March, "I like this better than Twitter. Actually they did us a favor."
This is far from Trump's first experience with blogging. Trump's previous blog, kept in the mid-2000s on the website of the now defunct for-profit real estate school Trump University, followed a similar structure but was allegedly ghost-written.
