I tend to agree with many of the comments above, but I went through the process of creating a
Facebook Page for AmigaLove simply because there are over 500 million people who
do like to use Facebook, and some only use Facebook as a means to receive filtered information. Is it an echo chamber? You better believe it.
But to ignore it, I think, is probably the wrong approach. There very well may be a small handful of folks over there who would very much like to consume some of the content posted here. A recent post I did over there (and had to spend $7 to do it) reached over 600 and garnered over 40 likes. Did that create any traffic? Nope. But did it make a few eyes open? Maybe.
Will they ever come back to the FB page? Maybe a couple. Will they become active members here? Doubtful. But not trying anything
guarantees they won't.
FWIW, we also have a Twitter account for AmigaLove. It, actually, has grown quite a bit this year. The account started in February or May and has already over 285 followers. Does Twitter drive traffic? Almost none. Does it create brand awareness? Definitely. At least, so far, it seems to have quite a bit.
Some basic figures, for those who are into this kind of thing...
In the past 30 days, the following are traffic referrals from other sites (this is pulled from Google Analytics, which has its own issues). These count as "sessions" not "unique visitors", so there could be some overlap. Regardless, in the vein of total transparency (I don't mind):
- Reddit: 786
- Google (search): 294
- EAB.abime.net: 116
- Lemonamiga: 75
- Twitter: 75
- Facebook: 62
- Duckduckgo: 13
- YouTube: 9
And lots of other little stuff. In all, across August, 2016, amigalove.com served content to 2,023 users who created 2,591 sessions on the site. That's pretty good, IMO. That's the third-best month since the site launched in early 2016. (April was completely
bananas, with over 11,000 sessions alone due to the insanely
popular post "The mysterious sales numbers of Commodore computers", which admittedly hit a much larger audience due to the broader topic.)
Building a site, let alone an active community, is a bit like farming without knowing if your crops will ever take hold. Is the soil good soil? Is there anyone who likes this type of vegetable? It used to be "the thing" but that was a generation ago. And yet, there are some other Big Agra companies out there already supplying a form of this to a rather cozy population of folks. Could some nice new packaging entice any of them?
At the end of the day, hopefully for yourselves as well, this is a labor of love. It's not really "work" even if at this young stage it feels like we're mainly talking to ourselves and a select outside group that finds us interesting from time to time but hasn't joined the party.
And I think that's OK. For now, I think all of this is OK. More cool stuff to announce soon, too, by the way.