North Carolina dirt track is now closed, joining a list of dirt tracks to close this week
Friendship Motor Speedway is a 4/10-mile dirt oval. The race track is located in Elkin, North Carolina.
The dirt track hosted a full range of weekly racing classes. Those included: SECA Crate Late Models, Super Stock 4, Renegade, Extreme Stock 4, U-Cars, Open Wheel Modifieds, and Limited Sportsman.
Friendship Motor Speedway is located 55 miles from the famed 311 Motor Speedway. It sits 58 miles from Millbridge Speedway. Additionally, 63 miles away sits the Mountain View Speedway.
The track is in a hub of auto racing venues. 9 dirt tracks sit within 100 miles of the Eklin dirt track.
This week, the track joined a list of dirt racing facilities to announce their closure. The announcement came on May 27th, the night after their Memorial Day weekend program which paid $5,000 to win in crate late models.
The track issued the following announcement via their facebook page:
“After much thought and consideration, we have decided to step away from the racetrack. We tried to keep racing but with so many places to run, we just didn’t have the cars or fans we needed to break even every night. We appreciate all the fans, drivers and staff for all their support and I’m sure we will see everyone in the future.”
The track joins a list of dirt tracks that announced their closure this week.
Decline of social media
I’m going to drop some digital knowledge for you. Of which, is highly related to this topic.
It’s worth noting that the previously had a website but had been operating without one recently. Essentially, their digital marketing campaign included social reach and that alone.
That’s worth noting because social reach is near non-existent in the current and forever changing digital landscape. I know a lot about this topic. Personally, I saw the change coming years ago via daily, more hourly, evaluations and adopted a wide range of new strategies to stay alive. Those new strategies were put into place a year and a half ago.
Two years ago, RacingNews.co received 90% of it’s traffic from Facebook alone. The drop in that social referral traffic has been rapid to say the least and now, it’s near non-existent.
Today, totaling up every bit of social media referral traffic (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others) only brings 10% of the total audience to this very website, despite the very large social following. Facebook has significantly cut the reach of all posts stemming from any ‘Facebook page’ as the feed spaces were replaced with content from ‘Facebook profiles’.
What caused the decline of Facebook reach?
This was spawned from several different things. I won’t even explain them all because there’s too many. But, I’ll go over the bigger ones.
Most notably was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal desire for ‘Meaningful Connections’, whatever that means. That resulted in video and page posts being cut from 5% to 4% which brought an instant 20% drop in social reach of all posts sourcing from any ‘page’ in comparison to two years prior. Instead, the Facebook feed was filled more with comments and friend activity from ‘Profile pages’.
Things got worse when it was discovered that Russia purchased political ads on the Facebook ad platform with the goal of creating separation for American voters. It was an action the online service original denied but was proven true over time and brought to their attention as a reality.
Facebook started to get away from reach of business content and replaced it with even more content of profiles. Facebook soon appeared in Congress and are currently setting the stage for what could become new digital regulations from governments as a result.
More recently, overall trust was lost in the platform when the public learned that data of 78 million Facebook users had been obtained by Cambridge Analytica for use in political ads in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
In addition, to the reach of all posts from pages being cut again and again, overall traffic to the social site was also declining. In the last two years alone, daily users on Facebook has dropped 50%.
Social Media: 2019
It’s been dropping from all angles. Not only are page posts being shown less in a feed but overall traffic is also down 50%. In other words, social reach from all Facebook pages are down about 75% from two years prior.
What am I saying? In 2019, a social media page alone isn’t near enough to generate your online marketing campaign for any business. You need a more diverse strategy, using more internal features that you can control without the risk of Facebook or other platforms taking it away. All of which, require a website.
In the past, I created content specifically for Facebook. That’s long gone and Facebook is no longer a focus point from any angles.
Social media is still highly useful as a whole but it’s only one small tool of a full list of online opportunities. A Facebook page alone will help but it’s not going to move any of the needles or any other social platform.
I wouldn’t be so bold to call this the sole cause of the closure of the dirt track. But it certainly didn’t help and it’s probably a much bigger reason than even they are aware of.
More
North Florida Speedway: Dirt track for sale
Mountain View Raceway: Dirt track resurfaces from the grave
A new dirt track is coming to Georgia
The Dirt Track at Edgewater: New dirt racing track coming soon
Meet the new promoter of the Richmond Raceway dirt track
Thunder Mountain Speedway: New Dirt Track Coming Soon
