The Dandy Dons moving forward

A little bit of social media insight for you, which while you have no particular reason to care for The Dandy Dons Facebook page, will explain what is happening with a lot of other content you may be interested in on Facebook.

For whatever reason* Facebook is killing off pages. It has been slowly strangling them for the last six months by way of cutting organic reach and dramatically reducing reach to followers (down to less than 5% of the 10 000 that follow the page on a single post and falling).

By way of example in the first two years of this page (it’s almost three!) the page picked up 5 000 followers per year. In the last six months, it’s picked up about 200. With pretty much the same level of work. Six months ago the page could easily reach 100 000 people in a week, it’s now down to 20-30 000. Which is still a great amount of people to communicate with, but knowing Facebook it’s only going to get less.

While the page could have reached ‘peak Dandy Dons’ and followers gotten bored or moved onto something else, a quick Google shows this is a development facing all sorts of Facebook business pages.

It’s not all bad news, as a result the page is using other platforms now in addition to Facebook which give different possibilities. The Dandy Dons on Twitter, where everyone is a thousand times more argumentative. And death threats are just another day at the office. On Instagram, where I can hang around with the beautiful people and proper artists as if I fit in.

I will endeavour to get more work onto the blog first in future, so if you sign up you get an email notification when there is a new post. Seldom more than one a week. You can sign up at the bottom of the page.

The Facebook group

Facebook are also pushing me to create a members group for the page. It creates community and interaction and this is Facebook’s way forward. So my page now has a group called The Dandy Dons Group. Now the difference with a group is you can post content too, not just me, plus it’s to be more of a community, more chatty, more interaction. It’s also closed so there is a degree of privacy. Anyone misbehaving can be easily expelled. Who knows what will come of it, you the potential member will be part of what controls that. A members club should have something more than just the normal page, what that is, well we will see as it develops. So you are all invited. Except I can’t invite you from Facebook, though weirdly I have the ‘power’ to make every page follower a member. But I’m not going to do that as it would piss me off if it was done to me. I think this is the group link.

*For whatever reason?! Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation here. But I think it is quite clear Facebook have been ‘threatened’ by the media onslot decrying ‘Fake News’, which mysteriously appeared as a phrase in the entire mainstream media pretty much on the same day. Day after Trump got elected. No reason to like Trump, but the people were pretty much being manipulated to vote for the Establishment candidate Clinton, who got the Democratic nomination based on the US msm singularly ignoring Bernie Sanders campaign, despite enormous numbers of people turning up to hear him speak. Alternatively in the UK, from the day he was elected leader, everything has been done in the UK msm to destroy Corbyn. And social media stopped them getting their wish. ‘Fake News’ really ought to be called ‘the wrong sort of propaganda’.

The fight for the internet is on. And Facebook is leaving the fight.

Find The Dandy Dons memes and illustrations here:

Instagram
Twitter
Facebook (main page)
Facebook (the closed group)