Introduction
I have mentioned previously how I decided to control my social media usage by following some personal practices. I also thought that having a YouTube channel and an Instagram page would be enough outreach for my blog. Those made me stop working on this blog’s Facebook page since July 2023. Recently, I made a U-turn and decided to take it more seriously and below you will know why and how.
Assembling An Online Team
In a previous article, I mentioned my goal of finding early travel bloggers online that want to succeed as badly as I do. In doing so, I made three public announcements: an Instagram post, a YouTube community post and I changed my blog’s home page to include my message. Since none of them worked, I thought of using other popular platforms, because I was so adamant not to use Facebook. I contemplated the following: Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, Quora and Tumblr. My YouTube comments advertising the message to others got deleted for going against community guidelines. I tried finding groups on YouTube, but then realized that it was unnecessarily tedious because it is not primarily designed for that even though it is somewhat possible. The same thing happened on Instagram. I even considered cold messaging on LinkedIn, but realized that it was going to be a waste of time. Then, I read many travel bloggers online who strongly recommended joining Facebook groups to find other travel bloggers. Then I thought to myself:
I have already setup a Facebook page for the blog and I have been using Facebook for schoolwork and other projects all these years until graduating university. Bloggers and especially travel bloggers really preach its prowess in finding like-minded people with similar goals. Why would I go out of my way by creating accounts on platforms I am not interested in just to find people (and coming back on them daily, because I really need to find them) and then never use it again afterwards? Why not just use the existing Facebook page that I can not only use to find people, but also to actually build my blog’s outreach?
For the kinds of goals I had, I did not have a choice, but to use Facebook.
How I Use It Now
I devised a method to prevent feeling like I wasted my time on it, because it used to be the platform where I felt that the most. It was constantly stressful having to keep up with people’s accomplishments and for group projects especially with pressing deadlines. I used to feel very anxious at the end of the day about not having been productive enough with any life aspirations. Therefore, I was convinced of not letting this happen again which is why I devised the following method:
Whenever I log in, I must work on my creator page by either:
- sending public messages on groups to find travel bloggers or people I would like to work with
- managing the group I created (accepting members, scheduling useful meetings, etc.)
- replying to genuine comments (or replying to friends)
- uploading pictures with text posts in English, French or Spanish publicly
- uploading short form or longer videos publicly
While doing all of the above, I can check my insights quickly and when I am done with anything productive I can think, I must log out immediately and only come back whenever I have new related tasks or some corrections. Those are my practices in order to prevent becoming addicted and logging in just mindlessly scrolling, anticipating notifications, seeing other people’s cool lives while remembering how they shamed me, etc. Even if I do not achieve my goal through using it exactly how I envisioned, I still feel significantly more productive and as if I really learned skills or insights.
Finding Success With Video Reels
To improve my Facebook page, I had many ideas of content and posts. I thought of posting graphics to advertise my new blog posts, uploading all the pictures I shared on Instagram or just upload all the videos I uploaded on YouTube and Instagram already. However, I decided not, because I figured that it would be a waste of time to make 68 of them after witnessing my first graphic post reach literally nobody. Therefore, I decided to only upload my short form videos, because of MrBeast‘s advice on uploading the same content across platforms. To my surprise, my videos got more views than on my Instagram reels or YouTube shorts COMBINED. Below is an example of one of them as of September 3rd,2023 (me cycling 100 km for the first time) :
I found it interesting how uploading the same one on three different platforms generated completely different views results. Even better, all of the videos that received 0 views on Instagram and YouTube for two solid months received a couple on Facebook after only one day! One experiment I tried was to upload three new same videos on the same day on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. One day later, ALL of them on both Instagram and YouTube got 0 views while on Facebook, they got 8 views in to total with each getting at least 1 😲. That was surprising to me and it convinced me that Facebook can work after all. I previously thought that YouTube was the MAIN platform for videos, but I guess not exactly at this point. That really blew my mind 🤯.
Conclusion
In short, I was wrong about Facebook and I must now admit that it is a powerful tool for bloggers. I still did not find any early travel bloggers nor achieved virality (although it was never my goal), but I am glad I gave it a try.
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