At some point yesterday ENGINEERING.com reached 1M followers on Facebook.

Here’s how we did it:

1. Started by sharing stories that matter to engineers, even if they weren’t ours.
2. Paid for Facebook promotion in the early days, especially to get us to 100,000.  Nobody wants to join a community that has no followers.

3. Made it one of the engineer’s jobs to post to Facebook 2-4 times per day.  This wasn’t a full-time job.  Kyle still had to write 2 stories per day, manage the other social media and then write some other bigger stories too.  Having an engineer write the posts got the titles in synch with our audience.

4. Make sure there is a great picture with every post.  Lots of Facebook users are on mobile, and they decide what to read partly based on the image.

5. Once we got to around 600,000 followers, Facebook decided that they liked us and so they started promoting our page.  That took our audience from 600,000 to 1M in about 40 days. 

6. Started early.  Sorry, but it would be false to pretend this would be as easy if you start your Facebook page in 2014.