ENGAGEWEB

Get the latest news on Facebook

Matt Jones

It wasn’t long ago that if you wanted news you would simply pick up a newspaper and start to read. Sure, you’d be getting someone’s very political slant on the news and the news you’d be reading would be from yesterday, but it was the best we had. Then radio and TV changed that, and news became more immediate. We still had to wait for allotted news times, but we could get today’s news throughout the day.

With the emergence of digital TV, channels such as Sky News offered round the clock updates on the world’s events, but you still had to tune in and wait for stories to rotate.

Today of course we don’t bother yesterday’s news from newspapers, or even news that’s several minutes old from television. No, we use the Internet. Even with the Internet, news can take a while to get out and for people to access it. Not so with Facebook. In the last 24 hours we’ve seen two pieces of entertainment news revealed on Facebook to legions of fans at the same time.

The first piece of news came on Thursday night when film producer Don Murphy announced via his Facebook profile that Transformers 3 was scheduled for July 1st 2011, and Michael Bay would be directing once again. Countless reports from newspapers, magazines and websites suggested that Bay wouldn’t return, but Don Murphy (through Facebook) put pay to those rumours.

The second bit of news came yesterday, and concerned the comedy show Mock the Week. The official Mock the Week fan page on Facebook, which has over 423,000 fans, revealed that Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle was leaving the show. This allowed almost half a million fans to learn of the news before any newspaper, news program or website broke the story.

The immediacy of the news offered on Facebook makes the social networking website the perfect tool to reach your fans, customers and friends with updates. Are you using Facebook in this way?