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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/100kfollowers2.jpg

Woot woot!

Congrats, 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.

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/facebook011922a.jpg

This is fantastic!

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.

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/socialmedia052522a.jpg

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.

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.

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/ramsay052522a.jpg

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.

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.

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.

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

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

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalkarmory061022b.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/oklahomanarmory061022b.jpg



TWITTER

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalkarmory061022aa.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/cooparmory061022a.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/oklahomanarmory061022a.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/lackmeyerarmory061022a.jpg



INSTAGRAM

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalkarmory061022c.jpg

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.

^

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.

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.

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.

Yeah Pete thank you for all your hard work. OKC is blessed to have this forum and the format is awesome.

This is interesting.

We posted the photos on First Christian this morning then the Oklahoman did the same about an hour later.

Look at the difference in numbers; this is typical and if anything our totals are usually higher (they are still going up). The local TV stations are pretty similar to the Oklahoman.


Twitter:
HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/oklahoman092622a.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalk092622a.jpg



Facebook:
HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/oklahoman092622b.jpg

HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalk092622b.jpg


Instagram (Oklahoma didn't even post there):
HTTP://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/okctalk092622c.jpg

Pete, I notice this happens to OKCtalk posts a decent amount on Facebook, but do you have any idea why FB will occasionally just drop a single image from a story into peoples feeds without the context of the story? It usually leads to several confused comments from people asking what is going on with the picture. Maybe it's just as you are uploading images FB is just sharing those out sometimes? Maybe you are posting them purposefully lol I dunno.

https://i.imgur.com/CslYmlu.jpg

Here is a recent example. So this image just appeared on my feed alone. No story attached or anything. It also happened to me a week or two ago when you posted about the indoor gokart place, the picture of the model of the track just randomly showed up on my feed. And a few more times over the last couple of months.

Just curious if anyone else has noticed this or if it's just a weird FB glitch.

^

No idea.

Facebook is constantly changing its software, especially for businesses. All this Meta Business Suite malarkey.

I still post the same way I always have. I suspect it is just a glitch in the many changes Facebook has been making.

It's not a glitch as I notice this from personal feeds as well. If you upload more than 1 photo it will group them together in the same post, but also will treat them as individual photos/posts and randomly push it into a feed.

My recommendation would be to find the link to the main post containing all of the pictures, and then (on a desktop) click on each individual photo and add a comment with a short summary of what the post is about with a link back to the main post.

OKCTalk just blew past 190,000 social media followers.

Should pass 200K in the next 2-3 months.

Pete, Is there a way for you to know the percentage of social media followers by state? Or at least for one of the media platforms?

Pete, Is there a way for you to know the percentage of social media followers by state? Or at least for one of the media platforms?

Yes, you can look at those metrics as the account owner.

For OKCTalk, about 95% of our followers are in Oklahoma.

In breaking the big story about OKC and the Olympics, between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram we had 950,000 (!) people view the posts. Almost 700,000 on Facebook alone.

The number is still climbing so good possibility we'll break the million mark for the first time ever.

I know it's still in it's infancy, but with the instability at Twitter I know Mastodon has been growing in popularity. Curious if you might be considering adding a presence there at some point?

I know it's still in it's infancy, but with the instability at Twitter I know Mastodon has been growing in popularity. Curious if you might be considering adding a presence there at some point?

If I was to add another platform, it would be TikTok.


As it is, for every story there is a ton of reformatting that has to be done: OKCTalk News page; OKCTalk forum post, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram plus Insta links back to the OKCTalk content. Then, I have to tag the appropriate accounts in all and every for the same business, all their tags are usually different.

One of the reasons I get so much engagement is that I format for all these different platforms, and it's a ton of work.

I've toyed with videos, shorts, and social media stories... It's just overwhelming. Anybody close to our reach (and a ton that has nowhere close) has a whole team of people just for social media.

Mastodon is a microblogging service that is quite similar to Twitter, so if you did expand in that direction you very likely could simply reuse most of the formatting you did for Twitter (minus account tagging). But it's still additional work and I *totally* understand if that's not something you want to do right now. I was just curious if it was on your radar. Appreciate the response!

^

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'll put it on my list but it's a low priority right now.

Congrats on the near 1MM reach for the Olympic story.

I think everyone here knows that OKCTalk is the go-to for all OKC happenings. You run the ship now. I hope you are being compensated accordingly, especially by the local businesses. You are basically a local 'influencer' and are an ad campaign launch for them.

Great work and thank you.

^^^^Agree!

Hit another big milestone today:

http://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/200k.jpg

Maybe it's time to start the OKC Talk Gazette? ;)

Maybe it's time to start the OKC Talk Gazette? ;)

Stay tuned!

Maybe it's time to start the OKC Talk Gazette? ;)

He can probably buy what's left of it on the cheap. That is if a dispensary doesn't do it first. Lol