Ranking Social Communities for the Oracle Database Professional

This blog post was going to be JUST that picture above. The size of the logos show what I think are the importance, reach, or quality of their content. But I figured I should throw some words and numbers to go with it.

You might now know this, but I’m a bit obsessed with Social Media. It’s worked for me, and I think it can work for you too. But where to spend your time? What will give you the biggest bang for your buck?

The following words are my opinion and personal experience from using and participating in these communities for the past decade or so. I’m not a big fan of rankings, per se. But, if you are thinking about trying to do take your Oracle experience to the next level using Social Media, then I thought I’d give you a few Top N lists.

Quick shout out to @BrentO. He’s inspired me to show REAL numbers, as much as I can. It’s not to show off or toot my horn, it’s so that you can get an idea of what is REALLY happening over here. I’m human, so big numbers do feel good, that’s true.

Getting the Word Out

You have something you want to make known. You want eyeballs, lots of them.

OR.

You want a better job. Or you don’t want to worry about getting your NEXT job. I tell people that everyone is in marketing/sales, if only that means you have to look out for yourself.

Here are the number of folks that saw my stuff from the past 12 months. Except for StackOverflow which does not offer analytics based on year, only for all-time ‘possible’ eyeballs that landed on a page where you had a highly ranked answer.

Also, Facebook ‘page’ views – they don’t provide real stats over a year. So I looked at the graph they showed, and it looked like on avg about 30 visits a day to our SQL Developer page. Which is…awful. Considering it has 10+ fans/likes, and I post to it several times a week. But, I don’t pay for ads. Maybe I should?

Rank	Network	Audience
1	Blogs	1,340,270 PageViews
2	StackOverflow	361,000 people reached*
3	YouTube	180,000 Views
4	Twitter	3,201,000 Impressions 57,618 ‘Engagements’
5	Quora	80,000 views
6	Slideshare	27,780 views 384 downloads
7	Facebook	11,000 views

PS Twitter: Impressions. That’s the number of people whose timelines your Tweets crossed. It’s a HUGE number. The more important number for driving traffic or taking an action, is going to be much, much less. Twitter told me my avg enagagment rate over 90 days was 1.8%, so I applied that to the total number of people reached over a year to get the 58k number. It’s at best, a guesstimate. But it ‘feels’ right.

PPS Twitter: It’s my opinion that Twitter is both overvalued and too quickly dismissed as a valid place to spend time. It’s overvalued because people see ‘huge’ follower or impression numbers, but the reality of actionable behavior is MUCH smaller. But, it’s probably where the strongest relationships are built, and you can drive real business and change folks’ perceptions there.

Driving Traffic

You want to share a link to your product, your blog post, your event, your SOMETHING.

Here are the top traffic sources for my blog over the past 365 days.

You should know that Search Engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) DWARF all of these traffic sources. They supply about 88% of my blog’s traffic. So Social provide a nice ‘bonus’ bump.

Rank	Network	Visits Delivered
1	Twitter	4,700
2	Facebook	2,685
3	LinkedIn	1,060
4	StackOverflow	738
5	OTN	556
6	OraFaq	356
7	Quora	193
8	Reddit	153

Getting Help

This is a subjective list, but it’s based on real observations. If you need help with an Oracle Database problem, you can rely on these properties.

1. OTN
2. AskTom
3. StackOverflow
4. Oracle-L
5. Blogs

Search engines will take you to answers on these places. And you can ask for help on someone’s blog, and their likely to help you. We have an entire team of folks answering your questions at AskTom. I could easily switch any of these rankings. If anything, you should be aware of or using ALL of them.

Networking, Making Friends

This is a purely subjective list. I could have also called this one, ‘Having Fun.’ Twitter wins this in a landslide. I’ve met many people on Twitter, and went on to become friends in real life. There are a good many I’m waiting to get to the IRL phase too!

For Facebook, I mean my personal page and not the SQLDev Page I take care of. I’m pretty selective on who I accept friend requests from, so unless we Tweet together a LOT, not gonna happen.

For blogs, I have folks come up to me at conference and introduce themselves because they know me from my blog. But it’s not common that I get to know people by their comments left on my site, but it DOES happen.

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Blogs

Twitter wins this by a landslide. It’s a very personable, interactive forum. Facebook is a special case, I generally don’t accept friend requests from folks unless we’re already friends. And Blogs, well, I like to learn more about a person by reading their blogs.

Other Places

I blog on LinkedIn and Medium. But nothing crazy is happening there. But I keep trying, experimenting. A few hundred, maybe even 1,000 or more views per post.

GitHub. I’m not a developer, although I did start posting examples for ORDS. If you’re a developer and have the time and ability to share cool things you’ve built, definitely go there and do that. I just don’t have the experience there as a producer to share much of value, yet.

Reddit. Something interesting shows up here every few weeks. I check in a few times a day just to see what’s what.

Oracle-L. A great place to go for advice from people that have TONS of experience. But it’s email subscription. So create a folder for that. And if you ask a question, get ready for a lot of strong opinions.

OraFaq. Pretty much dead. I check it every few weeks, just for giggles.