Story #112 Zoom Zoom -
Back on line after a week away, had some nice family time for Christmas. I hope everyone had a good holiday and that Santa brought some narrow gauge goodies. Anyway, I was off the net for a week and I checked the museum's facebook page this afternoon for activity. Back in April I designed a spread sheet to track hits/views of various posts so we can see what subjects and photos do best. I fill in the reach numbers each day for posts and track the page likes which fb counts for us. In going through the most recent posts I compared numbers from last Tuesday with today. Everything looked normal as I started down the post column. The Victorian Christmas posts had a couple hundred more views which is pretty good considering holiday travel, etc. Then I check the MIXED TRAIN post, it had 6,000 additional people reached. Wait ... what??? Over 6,000 more views of one post since Tuesday? I did some digging. Manager mode on fb allows us to see what photos get the most attention and the people who shared a post or photo. It also shows how many [liked] the shared post once it is placed on the other person's page. (Hope this isn't too confusing.)
In researching the MIXED TRAIN views and shares I found that most of the 6,000+ views were of the Model T railcar which is in the last 3 photos of the set. Going a page further I saw that most views came from antique automobile club people. It seems the antique auto folks discovered, liked and shared our railcar photos. It's funny, the RC photos were tacked on the end just for interest. The railcar had nothing to do with the mixed train, it was outside to run the engine (which keeps the bearings oiled) and charge the battery.
Here's a few of the groups that shared the photo(s) and posted comments:
The Model T Ford Club
J&S Automotive
Texas Transportation Museum
Vintage Car Club of Holland
T Fords of Texas group
Model T Ford Register of Great Britain
I don't know if anyone on the museum's fb team has thought much about reaching the antique auto clubs through our page but it looks like Leon's beautiful Model T Railcar has gotten a fan base on it's own. Thanks Leon!