My Rules of Engagement With Vocal

Initial Observations on My Vocal Writing

I was looking at my figures for posts, reads, and engagement with others. My attitude is that in the model I am in you cannot expect people to just read your posts without any kind of exposure and engagement, although link bombers seem to think that will just happen if they have a title like “How To Make $1000 a day on Medium / Vocal”. Ironically my biggest read Vocal post is the one below which was a sort of clickbait experiment based on the most-read piece on my blog, and has had over a thousand reads.

My Vocal Numbers

504 Published Stories

1174 Most reads on a story

2 Least Reads on a story

13305 Total reads

26 Average number of reads per story

36 Average number of reads per day

4663 Number of stories I have liked

13 Number of stories I like each day

10 Number of stories I like for each story I have published

I have subscribed to 450 Vocal Creators

283 Vocal Creators Have subscribed to me

These are how I see my performance on Vocal. All the figures are there and show that although I read and like (there are many I do not like) ten stories for each one I publish I do get two and a half that many reads from my Vocal audience and my friends.

I don’t follow my subscriptions religiously but love scanning new stories and reading ones that catch my interest if I have not seen them in the Facebook Vocal groups

How I Engage With Vocal Creators and Their Stories

Although we can now add insights as well as a heart when we read a Vocal story, we are limited to the Vocal options although it is nice to see that someone has left an insight or two on your story.

The absolute main form of engagement is in the Facebook Vocal groups where you can actually comment on the stories and complement the creator and maybe also offer constructive criticism. If I do see an error I send the person a message to allow them to fix the issue using quick edit.

I have said this in the past and will keep reiterating this if you engage with people in public in the Vocal groups you are likely to create reciprocal engagement with them and therefore get more reads for your own work.

As I essentially write what I want and don't really try and implement SEO and clickbait (I have done two stories like this, the one included at the start of this piece worked phenomenally well , and the other has had 30 reads) but I get a reasonable amount of reads.

I sometimes post them on Twitter (my account is on here) with some accompanying explanatory lead-in and then repeat that in the Facebook Vocal groups. I always include an explanation in the belief that it will make people read my story, although it is possible that people may feel that they do not need to read it because I have said something about it. I have a feeling that that happened a lot with my Seven Days In blog posts.

If Creators ask for stories to be shared I will try and share something appropriate in comments on their post if I have something that is immediately relevant but as often as not I will just leave a comment on their post.

In Conclusion

Engagement with other Vocal Creators will build up your audience and give you a significant amount of reads. My seemingly high read count is only there because of my prolific output, but that option is there for all of us.

I think "Join Together" by The Who is an appropriate song for how I think we should be engaging.