(Originally posted on Oct. 19, 2010)
And then there is The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. I don’t mean to pick on that paper, but the blog Journalistics posted a listing of the number of Facebook fans of the nation’s largest newspapers, and The Star-Ledger had just 372 (although today it’s up to 381, probably people who saw the list). You as an organization have got to be making a serious effort to avoid using Facebook to have numbers that low. For example, the Facebook page of The Weekly Observer in South Carolina shows 1,167 fans. (TBO.com, the site affiliated with both The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, ranks 17th on Journalistics’ list.) Examining these two actually shows a lot about what to do and what not to do.
On the not-to-do side there is just one, but it’s a biggie: The Star-Ledger simply does not post very often. Five times all year, as of the time I’m writing this. The only thing they are doing write is including links.
So what does The Weekly Observer do right? A lot of it is the opposite of The Star-Ledger: frequent posting. From 12:30 p.m. Monday to now, there have been four posts. The paper is a weekly, but this fan page gets daily attention. And everything has a link. As noted yesterday, posts carrying images and links not only get more clicks, they elevate your posts in the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine whether your fans even see what you posted.
Newsroom With A View 
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