Sarah Booker Lewis

A year ago when David Dade asked if I’d set up and look after social media for the first British Beard and Moustache Championships I was thrilled.

It was a few months before I had to do anything (I had nothing to work with in terms of a championships website etc.), but getting married and landing a full-time job filled my hours.

Once we got going it didn’t take long to build up a fan base as my Handlebar Club WAG status means I have the right friends on Facebook (husband pictured on stage below).

I encouraged (bullied) hairy friends to invite their friends etc. so an initial push worked extremely well as our likes increased every day.

Now the championships are over the Facebook page has gone viral. We’re still loading pictures and video and I’m constantly working on a Storify.

On Sunday I saw the Facebook page had 144% interactions. More interactions than fans! (I checked again Monday morning and it’s 384%)

It makes me happy.

It’s great to see new fans joining every minute now and a lot of ‘liking’ on Facebook and a tremendous amount of retweeting.

We started last week with 500 Facebook fans and we’ll break 900 today. We’ve also doubled Twitter followers.

Hundreds of photographs are going into the Flickr group and the YouTube account is a growing entity.

Today (Monday, September 17) the story’s on the BBC website and hit the Australian media. My favourite video so far is on The Age website.

What more could you want… Pinterest probably.

I’ll miss the regular meetings with the organisers, particularly the British Beard Club as I don’t see them very often.

We’ll keep everything going online as it’s a great way to encourage more people to get involved with the two clubs and enter international beard competitions.

Now… who’ll appear on the comedy programme asking for a champion moustache….