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.
