shi-yaku-jin no hokora is a small family shrine in the middle of the midwestern United States. We're really just a tiny lump floating in the cultural stew that makes up America.

There aren't a lot of people practicing shintô here, so our local support base is rather limited. As a result we rely heavily on the internet and social media to inform people about shintô and the hokora, thereby growing our support base. This in turns allows us to reach more people.

Our posts fall into two broad categories.

The first has to do with the daily and yearly routines of the shrine. These include prayers, offerings, and celebrations.

The second concerns the practices, rituals, festivals, and history of shintô — both minzuko and jinja. It also is pertains to Japanese culture and folklore.

While it's always exciting when one of our posts gets widely spread, its also a bit of a pain, as it throws a serious monkey wrench in the tracking machinery. The problem is that FaceBook only keeps track of top 45, counts by city, that have viewed a post. So for the two or three weeks following a popular post the new top responses pretty much bury those from our loyal fan base.

That single statistical outlier obscures the data for the people we're most interested in serving, and makes it harder to discern what they're interested in learning about.