Exploring Lincoln Turns One Year Old

It was 1 year ago today that I created the Exploring Lincoln Facebook page. I bought a camera 2 days later, and posted my first few pictures from around town on the 15th. I pulled some of the statistical numbers last night after midnight, to get an idea of what has happened here over the past 12 months. Here are a few of the numbers, along with a bit about what they mean.

# of posts I’ve made on Exploring Lincoln: 1082 (almost 3 per day). These have been links to content on my website (photo of the day, classic rock, articles, business profiles, etc) and also misc. posts notifying you of events going on around our area. I’m pretty happy with this number, as I’ve consciously tried to limit it. I don’t post advertisements on the Facebook page, I don’t put up posts telling you how great Exploring Lincoln is, nor do I say “Hello, World!” just for the sake of posting something. My goal has been to provide useful content, only add stuff that will either inform, entertain, or get people talking.

# of photos I’ve uploaded to Facebook: 8982 (over 24 per day). I was surprised that it was that many, actually. I’m kind of picky, so I edit/crop/lighten every photo I put up. And for everyone you see me post there are probably 5-10 more that I didn’t post because I wasn’t happy with them. At the average sporting event I will take 500 or so photos, and then spend another 3-4 hours selecting, editing, and posting them. Many of you have given me nice feedback over the past year, and I really appreciate it. Hopefully I’ll get better and more efficient at this, so I can spend more time covering events.

# of people “liking” the page: 2268 (over 6 per day). This is way beyond my original expectations. No, Exploring Lincoln is not the most liked Facebook page north of Bangor. But all a page like means is that one time the page did something that made you click that button. It is nice to have a lot of page likes, but the value of that number has changed over the past year. It used to be that everyone who liked your page saw all your posts. That is no longer the case – Facebook has changed their algorithms that determine what shows up in a user’s news feed. If you like a site but infrequently interact with it then you will not see their posts in your feed. Page likes is a bit of a misleading number because a page might have thousands of likes and make dozens of posts per day, but if people aren’t interacting (liking, commenting on, or sharing) with those posts then most of those fans never see that pages content. If you want to see the difference, click on the Likes number on any Facebook page to see how many people are “talking about” the page. That number shows you a couple day snapshot of how many people are actually interacting with a site.

# of interactions (likes, comments, or shares): 236,606 (almost 650 per day). This is an amazing number, and a much better barometer of the page’s usefulness, as it is the cumulative total of people “talking about” the Exploring Lincoln page.. Nearly a quarter of a million times over the past 12 months the content on Exploring Lincoln has prompted a response from someone. Social Media is all about conversation and interaction, and the more a photo or post causes someone to respond the more Facebook shows that post to other people. I am blown away by the buzz and interaction that happens every time I post photos. The latest prom pictures are a great example. Even though I have 2268 likes, almost 9000 people looked at the MA prom pictures I posted, and the Lee and Howland proms have both been seen by over 4000 each. How cool is that!

# of impressions (times someone has seen a post or photo): 2,492,909 (nearly 7000 per day)! This is a stunning number to me, and is a reminder of the power of social media. From zero to 2.5 million impressions in the first year is far beyond anything that I thought would come out of this little project. I am super thankful to all of you who have joined the conversation and interaction here, and can’t wait to see what happens over the next year as things continue to ramp up. The newspaper, the mobile versions, and all the rest were not even on my radar when this started. It makes me wonder what will happen over the next year. Stay tuned!