I’ve previously blogged about Facebook’s potential to help journalists and small websites like mine. Last month, Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s head of media partnerships, detailed more of Facebook’s power to help the media.
In a post titled, Working with Media Organizations to Build Social News, Osofsky unveils information on driving traffic, increasing engagement and an analytics system that website managers can use to track the number of times their posts get liked or shared—and by whom.
Duke Chronicle Photo by Maya Robinson
My first story as associate editor for Towerview, the monthly magazine published by Duke’s independent daily student newspaper, The Chronicle, hit the web July 1. It is a narrative feature on Duke’s incoming freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving. With no self-promotion from me, it has received 4,898 hits as of 11:45 p.m. and is the second-most popular story on dukechronicle.com. It has also received 35 “likes” via the Facebook Like button on the page, which is the metric I use to judge its popularity with the target demographic (see my post titled The Facebook Frenemy for more info on the Facebook Like button’s takeover of the web).
The reporting was challenging. It was my first assignment after I completed The Poynter Institute’s College Fellowship, so I was eager to put all of my new reporting tips and tricks to work. Unfortunately, I was in Dallas and St. Petersburg, Florida, while Kyrie and his father were in New Jersey, so all of my interviews were held over the phone. Not ideal. Also not ideal were the fact that my MacBook was in the store for repairs when I needed to write, and that I was on my own to find contact info for Kyrie and whoever else I wanted to talk to for the story. With a copious amount of research and a little luck, I was able to interview Kyrie, his father, Drederick, his high school basketball coach, Kevin Boyle, his AAU coach Sandy Pyonin, and a Duke basketball associate head coach, Chris Collins.
The first tool I used was whitepages.com. Remember that scene from All The President’s Men where the two reporters are pouring over phone books? Whitepages.com is the 21st century equivalent. I found one of the sources there (I won’t say who to protect that person’s privacy), and then he helped me find contact information for a few of the others.
I’ve spent the past few hours tinkering with my blog. Last week, when this site was still just a storyboard in my head, my buddy and fellow Poynter College Fellow Emily Ingram gave me this metaphor, which I love:
Your site becomes your sandbox. You go play there when you want to avoid work
Searching and test driving different plugins is an easy way to breeze through two hours. So is trying to figure out how to add my tagline underneath my name in my header 
.
Regardless of how badly I want “Paint by Words” to show up under “Laura Keeley” right NOW, I do feel a sense of accomplishment for adding two Facebook plugins with relative ease.
The easiest to spot is the Like button right at the end of this post. As the link shows, the code is available directly from Facebook. I went the plugin route and used the one aptly titled Facebook Like. It’s hard to believe that the Facebook Like button has only proliferated the entire Internet since this April. There are still bugs with the button—”likejacking” worms are abundant on my newsfeed—but for myself and other bloggers, this tool is golden.
Now if a Facebook user stumbles upon my blog and likes it enough to click the button, his or her entire Facebook network will know. This has the potential to be viewed by hundreds or thousands of people, depending on the number of friends said liker has. Then one of these friends might click on the link and spread it to their friends and so on.
Boom! Instant viral success.
