Monday, May 24, 2010

Using Facebook to Spread the News

As recently as one year ago, it would have been laughable to discuss a "Facebook strategy" for legacy news media companies.

As of early 2010 Facebook became, by membership, equivalent to the fourth-largest country in the world. Mainstream media aren't laughing anymore.

In April, Facebook rolled out a new set of social plug-in tools. These widgets offer media companies the chance to deliver their news "where the audience is".

One example is this embeddable "LIKE" box, which can be placed on a news web site and used to encourage visitors to "like" the media company. Why does a media company care? Once someone on Facebook "likes" your content, you can then post news stories to your company's Facebook page and those stories will be automatically "published" onto the page of every single person who is a "fan" of or likes your news site.



For example, KGW.com in Portland Oregon now has more than 3,500 'fans.' Every news story published onto the site's Facebook page is instantly added into the feed of those 3,500 fans. Each one of them has anywhere from 100 to 300 friends with whom they can choose to "share" the story. Those 3,500 can exponentially turn into 350,000 simply by a station's "fans" assigning value to the content.

That is the power of using social media not merely as a marketing platform but also as a news publishing platform.

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