Facebook is great. I have a friend and rarely a day goes by that I am not aware of some sort of food she has prepared and eaten.
Without Facebook the part of my brain that stores that information would have to be used for something else. Like long division.
For the , it's even better. It's a fast and efficient way for us to engage our readers. (That's an important thing in 21st-century journalism: reader engagement.)
This reader engagment takes a few forms. Most common is that we share information on our Facebook page and our followers (sounds slightly apostolic, doesn't it?) become aware of the content.
From there, it's off to the races. What we want people to do is share our content with their friends. That creates exponentional growth for the awareness of our story.
We also want them to comment on our stories. The benefit of this is twofold. First, all their friends (well, Facebook friends) will know that they've commented and are likely to go have a look at the same article. Second, that comment creates 诲颈蝉肠耻蝉蝉颈辞苍听 around our article, which is good for awareness and sharing and feedback to us. That's more reader engagement.
's a really good example of that. It's the address by Victoria poet Patrick Lane during convocation at the University of Victoria. It's not the kind of story that typically generates a lot of pageviews (just what it sounds like).
But this one has had more than 10,000 views, which is a huge number for a single article. The reason? Facebook. We can track where the visitors to a story come from and we know that about 70 per cent came to this story because of Facebook.
Another example is story, which generated a lot of discussion on Facebook. Not all of it was constructive or flattering:
But as long as people play nice and avoid potty mouth, it all still counts as engagement. We don't want to control what you say, we just want you to say something.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we can interact with the readership more and better. Do you want us more or less involved?
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