Moore or Less | No Filter
By Merv Moore | Shop in Seagoville | August 28, 2026
Seagoville, Crandall and Combine did not choose Facebook as their town square. They inherited it.
The Suburbia News covered this area for decades before it closed more than ten years ago. Nothing built to replace it. So the city, the schools, the churches and the small businesses all moved into the same rented space: a Facebook feed nobody actually controls.
That arrangement has quietly been costing this community for years.
Posting Is Not the Same as Reaching People
A Page with a thousand followers does not mean a thousand people saw Thursday’s post. Facebook ranks every post against everything else competing for that user’s attention, and most of it never survives the scroll.
A city can publish a real announcement. A business can spend real money on a special. A school can share real news. None of it guarantees a single neighbor actually sees it.
“Posting information and distributing information are not the same thing.” — Merv Moore, Moore or Less
Small businesses feel this hardest. Multiple industry studies have tracked organic engagement on business Facebook Pages running well under one percent of a page’s followers, meaning most of a business’s own audience never even interacts with its posts, let alone sees them.
The Next Generation Already Left
The generational math makes it worse.
Pew Research has tracked teen Facebook use falling from roughly seven in ten in 2014 to well under a third of teenagers today, even as adult use has held relatively steady. The future customers, voters and community leaders of Seagoville are simply not gathering in the same place their parents are.
A communication strategy built entirely on Facebook reaches fewer people every single year.
What Got Lost Along the Way
A real local news source gave this community something Facebook never will: one place people knew to check.
Instead, information now scatters across dozens of city, school, church and business Pages, each one competing against the algorithm and against each other. Residents have to already know what to follow before they can ever be informed.
That is not communication. That is a scavenger hunt.
Why Shop in Seagoville Is Growing
This is exactly the gap Shop in Seagoville was built to close.
We use Facebook. We do not depend on it. City updates, school news, sports coverage, business features and community events all live in one place that residents can return to on purpose, not by algorithmic accident.
Readers are noticing the difference. They are not just following a Page and hoping the feed cooperates. They are showing up directly, and they are staying.
“A community deserves a front page it can actually find.” — Merv Moore, Moore or Less
The Verdict
Facebook still has a role here, and it is not going anywhere. But it was never built to be a town’s entire information system, and treating it that way has left Seagoville, Crandall and Combine more fragmented than connected.
Local media does not need to beat Facebook. It just needs to give this community something Facebook was never designed to provide: a home page that belongs to the town, not to an algorithm.
Merv Moore is the Editor in Chief of Shop in Seagoville — Local News. Local Deals. Local People. His Moore or Less column is hard-hitting, opinionated, and not always comfortable. That is the point.
