How AMERICAN COLONY Made Us Relevant on Facebook

This is Week 114 of The Latino Newsletter, and this edition almost didn’t happen. The scheduled piece got pushed back a couple of days, so I decided to share one of the early wins from American Colony — this time from Facebook, of all places. 

I do think data serves a purpose in explaining certain insights about our work, although I have never produced a piece for data’s sake only. Still, after 22 years on Facebook, I have kind of given up on what it has become now, but when organic growth happens, I still find some joy in it, as if it’s 2011 again and Latino Rebels took off all because of Facebook.

So here we go:

Between July 1 and August 17 — the first seven weeks surrounding the American Colony launch on July 4 — our Facebook page saw:

The graphs all tell the same story: a massive spike right around the July 4 launch, then smaller recurring spikes every time a new episode dropped on Wednesdays through the rest of July and into August.

The reason was simple. When we decided to launch the podcast, we brought in two social media video voices — Anthony Modesto Milián and Aliana M. Bigio — to provide background context about our episodes. We posted Reels on Instagram (I will share more about that growth later this month), which would then be cross-posted to Facebook. Thousands of views and hundreds of comments later, we now have a new social community.

Across both platforms combined, we saw 1.7 million views, 217.8K in reach, and 101K content interactions during that same time period.

We now have more than 8,900 Facebook followers, and geographically, this is exactly the audience American Colony was built for. Nearly 75% of our followers are in the United States, but Puerto Rico is our second-largest country at 17.2% — an extraordinary number for a Facebook page. Look at the top cities: after New York, it’s San Juan, then Chicago, Bayamón, Carolina, Philadelphia, Orlando, Caguas, and Ponce.

So it looks like the archipelago and the diaspora found the same story at the same time.

We are a small, independent, nonprofit newsroom with no marketing budget. We also cannot afford paid ads. What we have is a bilingual podcast series about Puerto Rico’s colonial status, produced by a handful of people who care deeply about getting the story right.

And Facebook — a platform we had mostly treated as an afterthought — became one of the clearest signals yet that this series is reaching people who were not already following The Latino Newsletter every week. It’s reaching Puerto Rico itself.

We are going to keep leaning into this. More clips, more social-first storytelling, more ways for people to find American Colony wherever they already are — not just on our website or in your inbox.

We will take the win.

The Latino Newsletter is an independent nonprofit journalism outlet and production company. Your support will get us to a second season of American Colony. Give now to support our work.

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Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. He is also its current part-time publisher and executive director. He edited and published this edition.

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