New Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page

March 27, 2009 by Darren Alff

If you are a fan of Facebook, I’ve got some exciting news for you. The news is that I just recently created a Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page, where Facebook users can connect, communicate, and share inspirational bicycle touring stories.

Here’s the link to the page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bicycle-Touring-Pro/65806122535?ref=nf

I just posted the page last night and we’ve already got a small following of 9. But of course, I’d like to make that number a little bigger!

Why A Facebook Page?

For almost a year now I’ve had my own Facebook profile. Several of you have connected with me there and I’ve been enjoying our chats. Even more than that though, I love hearing about your past, current, and future bicycle travels.

But here’s the thing. Facebook currently restricts individual profiles to having no more than 5,000 friends. Pages on the otherhand can have an unlimited number of people join. And while I have nowhere close to 5,000 friends on Facebook (I currently have 389), I’d like to eventually get the BicycleTouringPro.com community up to well over 5,000 people.

Anyone that knows me knows that I always try and think three steps ahead, so this is simply my attempt to plan for the future.

The other reason for this change is because most of the 389 friends I have under my personal profile are people I know strictly from my personal life. They are people I went to school with, people I shot movies with in Hollywood, or people who’ve simply connected with me in one way or another over the years.

While these people don’t mind me occasionally talking about my bike trips on my personal profile, I think they get sick of me talking about it all the time! So this new Facebook Page for Bicycle Touring Pro will allow me to talk about bicycle touring with people who actually want to hear about it… and then I can use my personal profile to stay in touch with my close, personal, non-cycling friends.

What Is The Facebook Page For?

So, you might be wondering, “What exactly is this new Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page going to be used for?”

Well, I plan to use it mainly as a place for interacting with BicycleTouringPro.com readers. I’ve found that Facebook is a great place to communicate with people and I’ve used it a number of times now to actually meet up with people on my travels. In fact, I’m going to Bratislava, Slovakia tomorrow and meeting up with a man I’ve never met before, but found through a friend of a friend on Facebook. It’s really quite amazing… and it just shows how valuable social media sites like Facebook really are.

My point is this: Facebook can be a powerful resource tool for you and your travels. My hope is that Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook users can not only use this new Page to chat online about biycle touring, but that some of us might be able to connect in the real world, join each other on our travels, offer assistance to other bicycle travelers, and build up a small, but powerful community.

I Need Your Help!

Here’s the thing. If the Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page (or the community at BicycleTouringPro.com) is ever to grow into the size I’m hoping it will, I need your help!

You might be thinking that getting 5,000 people to join the Facebook Page is impossible, but BicycleTouringPro.com has almost three times that many people visit the website every month. So the people are out there! Now it’s just a matter of connecting us all in a single location.

If you know of someone (anyone) that might be interested in bicycle touring, long distance travel, lifestyle design… or crazy sports in general, please let them know about BicycleTouringPro.com and the new Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page. Whether you send them an email, call them on the phone, mail them a postcard, broadcast a Twit, or chat with them on your favorite social media website, I’d appreciate whatever you could do to help me spread the world about this incredible outdoor adventure we call “bicycle touring”.

Again, thank you for being a part of the Bicycle Touring Pro community… and I look forward to chatting with you on the new Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page.

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how we should use the new Bicycle Touring Pro Facebook Page, please let me know my leaving a comment below.

Here’s the web address one more time:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bicycle-Touring-Pro/65806122535?ref=nf

If you aren’t on Facebook, I encourage you to sign up right away. I was scared to do it at first because I thought it would a huge time drain, but it’s not! It can be if you let it, but for the most part I’ve found my experience with Facebook to be extremely valuable. And best of all, I’ve been able to reconnect with people I had lost touch with 5, 10, 15 years ago. Truly amazing!

Hope to see you there!