Exponential Growth Is Awesome

[andrewducker]

I get a regular weekly email from Facebook telling me how Andy Ducker's Links is doing. And apart from a couple of blips* I get about 1% growth every week.

I'm on 462 followers right now, and unlike on Twitter**, I'm fairly sure that all of those are real people.

So I did a bit of maths. And for a growth rate of 1%, it will take me 760 weeks to reach a million followers. Which is only 14 years.

I mean, I bet there's an S-curve in there, with there being only so many people who find my kind of links interesting. But I wonder how high it goes.***


*I hit 250 followers, and two days later one of my images went viral and gave me about 200 extra followers. This was surprising.
**My Twitter followers used to turn up in regular drips of a few per week as well. And then that just stopped. I still get retweeted a fair bit, but Twitter is definitely less busy for me than it used to be.
***And also what effect Facebook algorithms have there. I can tell when their algorithms change, because I'll spend a few weeks with numerous links going wide, and then a few weeks with hardly any traction, and without any serious change in content. And presumably they treat the bigger pages differently from the smaller ones.

Comments

[drplokta]

Time for a (re-)read of Katherine Maclean's "The Snowball Effect", perhaps.

[andrewducker]

Thank you! I hadn't read that in decades!

[casimirian]

I wish you luck on ever-lasting growth. :)

[bohemiancoast]

If it's a Facebook page, then FB starts properly penalising you for being big once you hit (I think) 100k. New Pages get a bonus for being new, and then a penalty for being small if they don't hit a certain size (maybe about 50?) quite quickly. And then they sort of level out and scale linearly for a good long time. But posts with external links get less reach than posts with only internal FB links *except* where lots of people share them, in which case they bounce back. My biggest page is about 10200 now, and typical posts get organic reach of about 2k unless they're a shirt post when it's about half that. Every so often I get a post that spreads much more; one had 25k reach the other week. It looks exactly like all the others to me.

Almost none of the page followers are bots, unlike Twitter where I think I get 1/3 bots, 1/3 people trying to sell stuff or follow shirt designers, 1/3 fans.

If you want to build the page (you might not), invite people who like posts to like the page.

[andrewducker]

I've been not actively inviting people, because that felt too pushy, and just mentioning it from time so that if people felt like it they could Like the page.

Good to know about the metrics - I get between 45 and 2,000 "views" per post. Picture posts get far more views than text posts. And all of my links are off-Facebook.

Oh, and yeah a large percentage of people on Twitter are people who have clearly followed me just to get a follow back.

[melchar]

Slow and steady growth is a good thing. As long as one grows, one is not dying. ^_^