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Not many local people can claim a social media following of well over 100,000 for a project that started as a bit of a hobby.
For 31 year old Andrew McCracken though, a love of motorsport cultivated over years as a child living close to roads frequented by the Ulster Rally and the Circuit of Ireland has resulted in a massive worldwide audience for his baby 'The Motorsports Hub' which he started in 2018.
Andrew from Ardaragh Rathfriland is an avid fan of all kinds of motorsport, Road Racing, Moto GP, World Superbikes you name it, even the British Touring Car Championships. Working for Destination Newry around 2014/2015 as a cameraman and video editor he put up some rally videos on his personal page. A montage video showing Ford Escorts got over 20,000 views. "For a personal Facebook page to get that amount of interaction, I was like, Oh, wow, I wasn't expecting that. That's when I seen that window of opportunity. I wondered if I was to create a business page, what would that be like". And so it began for Andrew.
It's an absolute labour of love for the project he wants to be 'Informative, interactive, creative and unique' but he would love to turn his spare time project into a viable business at some stage.
Andrew said "You just need to get that little bit of luck, that little bit of a rub of the green. You get one business involved then another business might look on and say 'oh he's actually got this company added on to the website Why don't we keep them informed and get our target audience involved as well.' "
His figures are staggering. On Facebook alone he has almost 77,000 followers with an additional 27,000 on a Facebook Group. Over the last 90 days his Facebook has reached over 2.7 million people. For the design of his website he is forever grateful to Shaun Byrne from Design Stics and the site currently gets visited by thousands of people every day.
The site and its resulting social media pages will appeal to any motorsport fan and the ethos is to help promote local sporting news. What started it all of was a 'bit of a rant' on Facebook about how TV stations hardly promoted any local sporting events. "I created a post back around 2018, Jonathan Rea was absolutely dominating in the World Superbike series. Nobody was batting an eyelid about that, there was very poor coverage. It was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award and Jonathan Rea won his fourth or fifth World Superbike Championship at that time. BBC never nominated him as a Sports Personality of the Year Award, which he was previously when he finished third in 2017. But then in 2018, despite winning another world title he wasn't nominated at all. I was really really annoyed with that. I put up a bit of a bit of a rant about it. I was like, hey, BBC it's a shame on you. This guy has just won another world Superbike championship and he should be recognised for his achievements, and you're not doing that at all." he said.
Andrew explains how it took off "It just exploded - over 2000 reactions by the morning. I think a quarter of a million people viewed the post and from there on that was basically lift off. It started to go bit by bit by bit by bit. I was covering local events and this was before the website was made. About a year in I seen the potential. It wasn't going to happen straight away but I just seen it just go on and on and I thought why don't I create a Twitter account, which reached more people and again it continuously grew bit by bit by bit."
He followed that with an Instagram account and he has 5000 followers on that and other platforms have followed since.
Formula One is his favourite sport and Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher is very much his idol. "I was just in awe with his real gutsy determination, he was so determined to win every single race and whatever bad situation he was in, it was never going to put him down, he was just going to go move on and go to the next week. That's like my mentality in some ways. if you get knocked down just get back up again. Any setback you take, just take it on the chin and move on. That's just a fact of life."
Ultimately the aim is to showcases local motorsport news and content via a user friendly website and popular social media platforms. Andrew adds "If you said this is just going to be primarily a Facebook page created for Formula One news, for all rally news, that's okay but there's 101 other Facebook profiles that do exactly the same thing. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to create this to help promote local motorsport news and local motorsport content. Specifically, if we were going to pick a subject like rallying rounds from the Irish Tarmac Championship, I have my sources. I have my contacts who go to specific events and they will provide me content in exchange for free advertising for them. It's a win win. You get the content, they get the credit for it. It looks professional, it looks creative, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, and so on."
Options are limitless for The Motorsports Hub. His followers are mainly from the UK and Ireland but also Australia, North America, Brazil and more. "There's businesses out there that could reach to anywhere across the globe realistically. Ideally for me personally, it would mainly be for businesses locally here in Northern Ireland as well as the Republic of Ireland and across the rest of the UK, England, Scotland and Wales. It's there for them. If they want their businesses advertised I feel this is the perfect window of opportunity for them."
Looking back to how things have progressed with technology in the ten years since he worked for Destination Newry Andrew said "When we were doing our live shows there would have been a machine called the Tricaster and we would have used that to do our live broadcast shows. Now look at it, you can do live streaming on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It rapidly changed so much. The couple of years prior from 2014 all the way to 2016 when Facebook Live started, the whole mindset changed dramatically. If you've got good decent internet connection, a good webcam and microphone you can produce good decent quality broadcasts. If I was out and about at a rally event, I would occasionally do live streams on Facebook or Instagram, but it's trying to find that decent connectivity at the moment. The technology in regards to the 5g network is not there yet. It's going to take a bit of time but once it does arrive that's going to change things dramatically."
Reminiscing on his roller coaster journey Andrew is very thankful to many people. " I'd just like to thank every single follower, from my from my own personal friends who liked it from the very beginning when it only had 100 followers or so from September 2018. To the people who helped achieved 1000 followers on Facebook, 1000 followers on Twitter or Instagram and then continuously expanding it. I never would have thought in my imagination that it would expand to to where we are right now but I'm incredibly chuffed about it and I'm just so thankful for everybody who has enjoyed the content so far and I hope they will continue to enjoy the content in the future and what's to come."
You can contact Andrew at info@themotorsporthubni.com
Check out the Website themotorsporthubni.com
Facebook: TheMSHub
