Facebook doesn’t seem to like events

by Raven

I don’t normally repost the thing I put on Facebook that originally came from this blog, but I’m frustrated with Facebook right now and I want to show the problem.

The problem is that there are all these good and important community and commune oriented events going on in Louisa this summer, and I’m trying to get the word out, but Facebook is not cooperating.

I won’t put the actual articles in here–just the links to them–but what I want to put in here is Facebook’s responses–which have been abysmal.

The first piece I put up on Facebook was the notice I saw on the Twin Oaks Facebook page that the Communities Conference was happening this year:

Here’s the link to the Twin Oaks Conference post.

I might have been excited, but Facebook wasn’t. They only showed this to sixty folks.

The metric I use, from posting on Facebook for a few years, is that over a hundred is decent, over two hundred is very good, and over three hundred is phenomenal. And anything under a hundred, didn’t do well at all. And every one of these posts (as you’ll see) got way under a hundred views.

Serenity Community, the BIPOC led forming community in Louisa County, decided to hold a food fest to make new connections and raise money and have fun. So I tried to publicize that.

Here’s the link to Serenity’s event.

Again, I was excited about it; Facebook was not. This was probably the most dismal of any of the views. At least one person liked it.

Not only was the Communities Conference happening, but Twin Oaks was also offering two other August events that they used to offer before the pandemic, the Queer Gathering (for queer folk who live in community) and the Women’s Gathering (for women in community). In addition, Paxus has been offering Quink Fair, a festival he describes as a combination of the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, and the Communities Conference, which he sees as a catalyst for personal growth and cultural change, and would take place in Louisa County in mid-September. So he (with help from Serenity and Twin Oaks folks) wrote an article advertising all five festivals. He put it up on his blog and I reposted it to our Facebook feed (at

Here’s the link to Paxus’s article.

This didn’t do well either.

I wondered if the problem was not having enough pictures, particularly pictures with people in them, so I wrote a new post using the same information (so basically there’s the same article twice on this blog) but adding what I thought was a more personal intro and then putting it on Facebook using a “You” statement at the beginning to attract readers and also an “I” statement.

Here’s the article I wrote on this blog.

Unfortunately, it didn’t make much difference.

Then I got really frustrated, but I thought I’d try one more time, expressing my frustrations, to see if leading in with a strong emotion would make a difference.

Nope.

Yes, this was the most “People reached” of any of them, but seventy viewers is still pretty low–and I wonder how many of them were just repeats of the folks that had been shown the previous ones.

So, I give up. I don’t know how to beat the algorhithm. At some point I might break down and post it again and use the “Boost post”–which means paying Facebook to show it to more folks. It’s blackmail, but I don’t know any other way to publicize these wonderful community events. I hope that at least some small number of folks go to some of them. They really are worthwhile, especially if you are interested in community.