What is Shop Local Delmarva?

Let's start out talking about a few of the positives of Shop Local Delmarva... We started out as a small Facebook Group that rapidly grew to thousands of members. Since our focus is on local business and our community it makes sense to require members to live on Delmarva or at least have a strong connection here.

We are a group of people who want to support our local businesses and our community. We want to keep our group and activity on it positive. We keep politics off of our group and out of the discussion. We want to hear about your positive experiences. We are a place to promote your local business. We are a place to raise awareness for events that benefit our community. And we raise awareness for many local businesses and community events too! So no we are not a review site. We have never claimed to be a google or a yelp. And we do not want to be one. We are a place to promote local businesses and support our community.

Seeing businesses post about how many people learned about them on Shop Local Delmarva is really amazing. See one of the post from one of our partners Addie's All Star Pizzeria in the pictures. Hearing or seeing that they have had so many people come in because of Shop Local Delmarva still makes me just as happy as the day that I started this group.

It is really awesome to see the business owners in person and chat with so many people who love what Shop Local Delmarva has become. Sometimes I am even surprised when someone starts discussing it with me and I didn't even know they knew who I was.

Now it is more than just a group on Facebook. We are now helping several businesses create videos and online content. We are sharing their post and information with our Shop Local Delmarva page and our website. Putting these businesses in front of thousands of more eyes. We have helped put businesses on the map...really. A local business was viewed 22,000 time from a 3D tour that we made for them. We are writing blogs and articles featuring so many exciting things going on all over Delmarva. And we want to do more. Each time I talk with the team I start rambling off ideas of future projects. If you want to see what we can help you with your business with email us at info@shoplocaldelmarva.com

Some of the not so positive. When this group was started I didn't want any part of what goes on all over social media. A bunch of drama, arguments, fighting, name calling. So we are a little bit different from most groups you will find on social media. We remove comments, we remove post if it is against our rules. We are quick to remove people from our group when they don't follow the simple rules that we have established in the beginning. When members violate a rule they are normally sent a warning with why the post or comment was removed. When they immediately come back and post the same thing or a really negative comment we simply remove them from the group.

Just about each time those people go on to post on their personal fb pages to let all of their friends know about how horrible we are for not allowing them to tell everyone the truth. Their version of the truth that is.

Or they message one of the other moderators or me. At this point it almost humors me when someone shares a post that someone did talking about something I or we have done. Half of the time I have to see if it was even us or Facebook itself that removed the content. We might have removed it, FB could have removed it, I have had people message me wanting to know why I took their post down and it was never removed at all and is still there. I normally send them a link saying this post?? It is still on the group?? I have removed posts that I really didn't want to remove. Ones that I complexly agree with but we aren't the place for it. I have left posts up that I really didn't agree with but it didn't go against our rules. So the rules are what the rules are.