10 things I’ve learned (and 3 things I still don’t know) after X-Culture’s 2 years and 87K followers on Facebook

A company Facebook page could be a great tool for promoting your business, building a community, and getting useful input from your followers. But managing it could be quite challenging, and frustrating at times.

Yesterday was exactly two years since I’ve created the X-Culture page. We now have 87,000 followers and add about 30 new followers a day.

Here is our experience so far, what I have learned over these 2 years, and what is still a mystery to me.

NOT ALL YOUR FOLLOWERS SEE YOUR POSTS

First, we used X-Culture’s FB page for updates, reminders, and newsletters.

However, soon enough we learned that FB doesn’t show your posts to all your followers. Bummer!

Apparently, there was a time when if you follow/like someone, you automatically see all their posts. Since 2013 or so, that is not the case. At that time, lots of outcry about it on the Web and people leaving FB in protest. But the policy stuck.

FB argues that there is more in your feed than you can physically see. So FB has to use an algorithm to decide what to show you. The algorithm is kept secret and is constantly changing to prevent gaming the system.

It appears the reach is affected by the initial likes, comments, and shares. Our ratio is about 1:200. Every time we get a like or a comment, the post is shown to another 100 to 300 people. If the first 500 people don’t like it, FB may not display it to more than 1% of our followers. If the post generates lots of likes, the post may be shown to 30% or more of our followers. Especially powerful are shares. Posts that get shared a lot may be displayed to more people than follow us. A few of our posts have been shown to over a Million people each, several dozen times more than all our followers at the time.

Whatever the reason, the first year was a very frustrating time and I was ready to shut down the X-Culture FB page. I could not use it for announcements and reminders because only about 10% of our followers would actually see our posts. And the number of our followers was quite small to justify all the effort that went into managing the page. You do a lot of work and only 300 people see it and of those only 3 like your posts. Very discouraging.

Hint: If you really like someone’s FB page and want to see their every post, set it to “See First”. Otherwise, FB won’t show you most of their posts, even though you are following them.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

Still, we were adding about 1,000 followers each X-Culture round and reached about 5,000 in the first 1.5 years. Most probably were X-Culture students, though some seemed to be their friends or just random people interested in international business. Our posts were shown, on average, to only about 1,000 people each. But each would get a few likes and some would actually generate interesting discussions, so that kept us going.

DOPAMINE DOES ITS JOB

No matter what someone tells you, anyone who posts on FB wants to be read. Every time someone likes your post, a little doze of dopamine is released in your brain and you feel good. That stuff is addictive.

FB knows the biology and psychology of addiction very well and uses it wisely. Soon enough you get addicted (more on this in “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal).

The side product of this addiction is that you start paying attention to what kind of posts generate more likes (i.e. dopamine) and inevitably start posting more of that kind.

In my case, posts about business startups and entrepreneurship got more likes than updates and news about X-Culture. Predictably, I found myself posting more IB and entrepreneurship posts. And as it had become more evident that many (most?) of our followers were actually not X-Culture participants, I started posting less about the project itself and focused more on IB and entrepreneurship in general.

YOUR FOLLOWER COUNT FOLLOWS THE HOCKEY STICK DISTRIBUTION

Then something strange happened. Something that books like “Hooked”, “The Tipping Point”, and “Contagious” had predicted, but I didn’t believe it until it happened to me.

On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 I (re)posted a few cartoons depicting the life of an entrepreneur. Just another post. Yet, when I woke up next morning, I noticed it reached an audience of about 200,000 and we had about 10,000 new followers, with a few hundred added each hour.

Sure enough, our followership graph looked exactly like a hockey stick:

Over a few short days, the post had reached over 1 Million people and generated thousands of shares and likes, and the number of our followers went up from about 5K to 40K.

You can see that tipping-point post here.

In about two weeks, the follower growth stopped as suddenly as it started and went from adding 2,000 followers a day to two dozen.

I started thinking that +40K was either a technical error or a gift from FB to get me hooked even more.

However, the same thing happened again a few months later and we added again about 40K new followers, to a total of about 80K. Again, in a matter of a few days and then it leveled off as quickly as it started.

What’s puzzling, this time there was not popular post with a reach of over a million and thousands of shares. Just a few good posts with a reach of a few hundred thousand and a few hundred likes each.

Whatever the reason for our sudden popularity, it completely changed the game.

First, now our posts were reaching thousands each time and generating at least a couple dozen likes and some comments.

Second, the vast majority of the followers were people who had nothing to do with X-Culture and followed us purely in hope to receive quality international business and entrepreneurship advice.

We had an audience of a small newspaper and keeping the page alive was an obvious choice.

UPDATE (2018-10-18)

This trend continues. As of today, we have about 173,000 followers and they keep coming in “hockey-stick” waves. Relatively slow growth punctuated by rapid increases. No idea why.

It appears the effort-result relationship is non-linear.

TO BE CONTINUED…

If this post generates some good reactions, I’ll also tell you:

What gets commented on most and what tends to be ignored completely
Ratio of new likes vs. unlikes
Our experience with advertising on FB: how much it costs and how effective it is
Dealing with haters, private messages, and cyberstalking
And more

By Vas Taras

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