So Legal Insurrection is on Parler, find us at @legalinsurrection.
Why? To reach our audience.
Joining Parler for us is in addition to, not a substitute for, Twitter and Facebook. Those two are still the big kahunas, but we have problems there. We are not reaching our audience.
Although we have almost 39,000 followers on Twitter, it’s rare for us to get even 100 retweets, unless some larger account retweets us. Even that is becoming less common. My conclusion is that our tweets are not being shown to our followers and supporters. Can I “prove” we are shadow-banned? No. But the reality is that while Twitter is immensely useful to us for breaking news, it’s not very useful to us in reaching out to readers.
Same on Facebook, though it’s somewhat better than Twitter. We have over 350,000 “likes” on our Facebook page, but most of our posts only “reach” (are shown to) about 10,000 people. Our Facebook shares are pretty good for such limited reach — often reaching several hundred and sometimes several thousand. Imagine what our shares would be if our posts were shown even to 10% of those who like us. We’re also constantly fighting the politicized fact-check monsters at Facebook, whose strikes can cause a severe restriction in reach. So we don’t share other people’s stuff anymore for fear of a strike. Here’s what two bogus strikes against our page did a couple of months ago, our reach fell off a cliff and took almost a month to recover:
So, we’re staying on Twitter and Facebook, but we’ve added Parler, to which a lot of non-liberals have fled. We quickly ran up over 33,000 followers, something that took us several years on Twitter. The lingo is different on Parler, but the equivalent of retweets and views is much better.
There are some things I’m not thrilled about with Parler, mostly it’s getting used to a new interface after a decade on Twitter. Twitter seems to pack more onto a single screen, which is helpful. Also, Parler requires a phone number to register — on balance I think that’s okay, it will help keep out the bot accounts, but I understand why some people would not want to give that up. There’s also was a controversy as to the indemnification provision in the User Agreement, but those provisions are not in the current version.
Parler is proving popular, approaching 2 million users. I’m not sure what the magic number of users is to make it sustainable, but it’s already attracted almost every major conservative Twitter user (but not The Donald so far).
As Fuzzy wrote, Liberal Media Sure Are Obsessed With Villifying #Parler As Alternative To Twitter. That’s a good sign that maybe Parler will have legs. We’ll see.
In the meantime, if you are on Parler, follow us @LegalInsurrection. Follow Fuzzy at @Fuzislippers, Kemberlee at @Kemberleekaye, Stacey at @sistertoldjah, Mike at @MikeLaChance.
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