OKCTalk on social media

[Pete]

We've only been posting with regularity for about a year, but we now have over 2,300 followers on Twitter and 3,000 on Facebook.

Please take a minute to give us a "like / follow" if you haven't already. Just click on the icons in the Navigation Bar above, and go from there.

Would greatly appreciate helping us accomplish the 10K goal on each platform. Thanks!

[Of Sound Mind]

I have been since you first announced it about a year ago. I very much appreciate your posts on both. I have frequently caught something sooner via your Twitter or Facebook posts that highlighted something that I might not have been paying much attention to in my normal perusal of this forum. Thanks for all you do, Pete.

[Pete]

FYI, OKCTalk just passed the 90,000 mark of social media followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

We are almost certain to pass 100K around the first of the year.

Biggest growth has been on Instagram where we have over 35,000 followers all added in less than 2 years. On Insta, we have more followers than the Oklahoman and Channel 9 and growing faster than the other 2 local TV stations.

[jccouger]

That's awesome Pete. I always think its cool when I see one of your posts & then I see how many of my "mutual friends" have liked/shared it. The popularity of the OKCtalk brand has grown so much over these years.

[poe]

That's great, Pete! OKCTalk is such a great asset for those of us not in OKC, and I really appreciate the lengths to which you and the other folks involved with OKCTalk and the Gazette go to make sure the site is well-managed and working for the good of the OKC community.

[catch22]

Great! Glad to see the continued success of the site.

[Pete]

We are rapidly closing in on 100K social media followers and should pass that milestone by the end of the month.

Interestingly, over the last week where we've continued to add scores of followers on Facebook and Instagram, a bunch (over 100) were lost on Twitter.

I installed a third-party tool to track what was happening and every single one of them turned out to be deleted accounts or those suspended by Twitter -- the tool doesn't differentiate.

It's hard to know if many people just purged their accounts after all the recent unrest and controversy or if because we are in Oklahoma, there were a bunch of crazies who got booted. Either way, it's really an interesting development.

[Pete]

This explains why more than 100 accounts that were following OKCTalk have now been deleted:

Steven Dennis
@StevenTDennis
Twitter announces it deleted *70,000* accounts that were primarily sharing QAnon content at scale.

If you've lost a lot of followers, it might just be you had a lot of Q-ers in your midst.

[Pete]

Hit a big milestone today: over 100K followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

[5alive]

Woot woot!

[mugofbeer]

Congrats, Pete!

[Pete]

OKCTalk now has over 137,000 followers on social media and we are adding on average over 150 every day.

Our engagement continues to be many multiples of any social media account in Oklahoma, including all the newspapers and TV stations.

Look at these numbers on a recent Facebook post; the same post has about 4,200 'likes' on Instagram (and over 52,000 engagements), where we average over 2,500 likes per post. For context, I'm not aware of any Oklahoma-based Insta account that averages over 1,000. And all these numbers are increasing at an increasing rate.

Demonstrates how many people really care about what is going on in OKC.

[MagzOK]

This is fantastic!

[Pete]

Another big milestone. We added over 50K followers in just over a year.

Our engagement numbers are many multiples of any other news site in the state and as far as I can tell, bigger than any Oklahoma social media accounts outside of OU and OSU sports and the Thunder.

[OkiePoke]

Congrats!

Most of the local news (KFOR, KOCO, News9) Social Media is terrible. Half the time they post birthdays or events that take place out of state. I'm wondering if they even run their own accounts.

[Pete]

These numbers are still going up on our FB post, but I've never seen anything close to this from social media accounts in Oklahoma.

Our Instagram post is just as big.

[Pete]

Congrats!

Most of the local news (KFOR, KOCO, News9) Social Media is terrible. Half the time they post birthdays or events that take place out of state. I'm wondering if they even run their own accounts.

A reporter from a local TV station contacted me and asked, "Can you please share your sources on the Gordon Ramsay story so we can cover it?"

I was nice in my response but think about this for a minute... They have no idea how to go out and get their own information (i.e. do actual reporting) even after the end answer has been given to them, and then want me to give them the source info so they can draft off my hard work (it took me months to verify this story) and then not give us credit.

That's the state of local news in this town. Everyone else basically sits around waiting for a press release (or a chum who wants a story out in a particular way for self-serving reasons) and does some light editing often without proper citation, or they just take stories from elsewhere without providing credit.

Oklahoma deserves better.

[TheTravellers]

A reporter from a local TV station contacted me and asked, "Can you please share your sources on the Gordon Ramsay story so we can cover it?"

I was nice in my response but think about this for a minute... They have no idea how to go out and get their own information (i.e. do actually reporting) even after the end answer has been given to them, and then want me to give them the source info so they can draft off my hard work (it took me months to verify this story) and then not give us credit....

Must not've been 9 - saw the story on there yesterday (I think) and they gave you credit in the upper left corner.

[Pete]

Must not've been 9 - saw the story on there yesterday (I think) and they gave you credit in the upper left corner.

It wasn't but Channel 9 does this all the time and has never even reached out to me. They don't have the right to use our images and information without consent.

And recently, they just lifted our images and story and never gave us credit at all.

[FighttheGoodFight]

Share your sources so we can copy the story :facepalm: They need to go back to j-school.

[Pete]

Thought it would be interesting to show the reach of our social media posts.

Here are the armory posts from a couple of days ago. We broke the story of course, then Lackmeyer and the Oklahoman copied it.

FACEBOOK







TWITTER











INSTAGRAM

[PoliSciGuy]

Ah well, at least take solace in the fact that your engagement blows The Oklahoman’s and Lackmeyer’s *combined* out of the water.

And the Q&A you did on Instagram a bit ago was a great move (though judging by the # of questions it had to be tough to keep up). It was interesting to see what’s on the general public’s mind in terms of developments.

[Pete]

^

Our engagement numbers are exponentially larger than any social media accounts in the state, save OU and OSU sports and the Thunder.



I'm going to do an "Ask Us Anything" post on Facebook as well, just need a bit of a breather.

Doing it on Insta is hard because you can't upload images or links in replies to questions, so much better suited to Facebook.

It's great to see how many people care about what is going on in and around town.

[catch22]

I was thinking about that issue -- have you tried bit.ly type links? On iOS you can't copy directly from an Instagram comment no matter what finger motion is made, therefore you need to type in a link manually. However in private messages you are able to click on or copy links directly. You could send the user an Instant Message with the clickable link, and include a bitly link in the public comment.

On a sidenote, it is fascinating to see who is engaging with your posts. Facebook is very handy at including a friend if they liked something before the displaying the number of likes. e.g. "Tom Smith and 850 others." that name that comes up for me is usually someone surprising who wouldn't ever post on this website or engage it other than on Facebook. That is a testament to the algorithm treating your content as valuable and extending far past the "core" userbase of OKCTalk.com. That is only a good thing as it means eyeballs are seeing this that likely wouldn't get their news anywhere else, even the local newspaper.

Happy for your continued success, it really is a blessing for OKC. I wish there was something similar in my neck of the woods. I have no idea what is going on. There's a 6 story hospital being built about half a mile from me joining up to my subdivision and there is literally nothing put out about it. Not even a press release. Finally, I saw a very small "coming soon" sign. Night and day difference in the access to information, and that is in huge part due to your hard work.

[Mississippi Blues]

That’s easily the biggest thing I’ve noticed having a passion for developments of any sort since I was an early teen and now with connections to a few different cities. Oklahoma City is the smallest in most measurable categories, including development, but it always feels like it’s at least on par with those larger cities due to how abundant and accessible information is with OKCTalk. In contrast, there’s barely even an acknowledgement of projects in the other cities outside locals moaning about growth. The only thing that comes remotely close would be urbanist blogs run by a few people at most but even those can be pretty inconsistent as they require an audience interested in niche urban topics like land use or transportation trends, which it’s not like those topics need to be updated daily or even weekly really.