South Perth Rouleurs

Ride Routes 6th – 12th June

Social Media Scrum. You may have noticed an increase in our social media presence this year. It is part of our rebuilding strategy to get a broader reach and attract new riders to our club. Social media on the best of days is hard. Finding content, pulling stuff together, formatting and posting all takes time and although there are AI apps to help, getting the right message is not something I would leave to a bot.

Unfortunately I took an awkward turn into the world of rage baiting this last week. There was an incident where a very impatient ute came right up the back of the Main 3 group and aggressively honked his horn repeatedly until he got by. We had just entered a section where the shoulder is protected by a kerb and as such couldn’t move across so he had to wait. He didn’t like that and kept honking until we moved. He was delayed a total of 15 seconds. It probably would have been less if he hadn’t aggressively pushed up to the group in the first place.

Now the Main 3 group is not the stereotypical lycra wearing alpha male tough guys. I would say the average age would be in the +50’s with about 30% of the group being female. This was probably a group made up of the same demographic as the driver’s parents. But we all get tarred with the same brush and get labelled as arrogant and entitled no matter what the law says for our use of the road.

Where this took a dark turn was when I posted this interaction on our socials, and to be fair, I did label the driver an impatient t**t. So that’s on me. Now I am never sure who really sees the things we post. A few weeks ago when I wrote about the AusCycling SGM we had our best engagement with well over 13,000 views and 41 interactions. Most videos we post get anywhere from 1,000-3,000 views depending on the content. However, in the world of rage baiting the key to engagement is getting people angry and this video seemed to get people angry.

The intent of the video was to call out some bad behaviour and maybe I should have refrained from the name calling. But the wonderful world of facebook algorithms meant that as soon as someone outside the cycling community commented, it then found its way into others feeds. By the time I turned off the commenting there were 318 comments and 263 reactions. This meant that it had pushed out even further than before and all of a sudden there are over 110,000 views. Now I would not recommend reading any of the comments. By the time I turned them off, there were a litany of homophobic slurs, multiple name calling, threats and pretty much anything else you can think of. It was clear that many people think we had “stolen” time from this poor innocent driver.

However, the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” does hold true to some extent. The views of the surrounding posts have increased, and we have managed to pick up new followers to the page. The challenge now is to convert them to riders and then to members.

Rage baiting is not a strategy I would recommend, especially if you are not thick skinned as there are many people who feel big and strong behind the keyboard and are willing to let you know how right they are. But unfortunately social media is here to stay and we need to utilise it the best we can to get our message out there. I may just refrain from the name calling in the future, even if they were acting like a t**t.

https://southperthrouleurs.com.au/2026/06/04/ride-routes-6th-12th-june-2/