Our fb story - a small caution to small businesses

For the last 9 months or so, I've been formulating this post in my mind.  This isn't a complaint so much as if I can help another small business through this, I want to do that.  As time passed, I thought about how this *might* have gone, had our business been less flexible.  I've gotten a lot of questions from other small business owners, and have shared when asked.  So here goes...

Last year at about this time, after working and planning carefully every day for 5 years (no exaggeration there), we had reached 11,000 fans on our page.  I was pretty proud of that number, but extremely frustrated because as the holiday season approached our posts were being seen by fewer and fewer people.  So I decided to try a few things.
I tried asking simple questions that got 100's of answers.
I did 3 or 4 giveaways over the course of a couple weeks.
I posted pictures with text including recipes and information (very sharable).

.... and then something magical happened.  Suddenly we were getting a thousand or more new likes a DAY!  It was insane and a little (okay - really, a lot) scary.  Where were they coming from?  What happened?
So I asked them, right on the page.  Turns out we were a recommended page, and people were following the link that facebook put up.  My guess is that all the recent activity on the page tripped something in an algorithm.

It continued until we were past 72,000.  That was last January.  We've barely gotten 1000 since then.  Again, not complaining, just aware.

In those 2 months or so, business went absolutely insane.  If I had not been able to pull in help from family (a lot of other sorts of businesses are not nearly so flexible), I would have been forced to hire help.  Maybe purchase equipment.  I've thought a lot about that this year, what other businesses might have been forced to do under those circumstances.  The worst thing for me was having to do a reprint of an issue of the magazine to keep up with demand - big deal :-)  I was also working on a book for a publisher with very tight deadlines that I would have renegotiated, had I know that the business was about to explode.

And then just as suddenly, the faucet was turned off.  I can't say that those additional 60,000 people aren't still a boon to our business, but they aren't the same as the 11,000 we grew organically.  At the same time, I have my doubts about the statistics shown and think they are under-reported, but that's another story.

So right now I'm seeing a lot of recommended pages again.  I suspect this might happen to other small businesses, so wanted to put out this small warning.

In the meantime, we're working on re-booting our Yahoo! group, and put more of our focus there and on our blog posts.  I can't complain because we love the fb page too - but now that Molly is working on social media we have a lot more options.