Facebook, for me at least, has mainly been about looking for newly updated photos of my two-year-old nephew who lives two time zones away in the Midwest. But I’m well aware this isn’t a mainstream point of view, and that many of the online social network’s 600 million global users really like to get their news via Facebook, and let the commentary fly among friends.
We love it when our readers share our stories this way. And we have designed our site to have links built into every story that make it a snap for you to share our content via Facebook, Twitter, and other services. But we figure it’s also time for us at Xconomy to do a little more on our end to participate in this killer distribution platform for the 21st century.
So today I’d like to invite all our readers around the country to take a look at our new and improved Xconomy fan page on Facebook.
We’ve had a fan page for a long time, and plenty of people have been sharing Xconomy content in their Facebook news feeds and having great (virtual) water-cooler conversations about it. But our page was basically just an automatic feed of every story we wrote and didn’t reflect how interactive, and personal, Xconomy really is.
Now we’re going to make this more fun, more personal, more conversational. We’ve turned off the automatic story feed, so instead of getting a blast of 20 or so posts a day from local bureaus around the country, you’ll get two or three editor’s picks spaced throughout the day. Besides the stories, we’ve added some photos from events we’ve organized from coast to coast, which you can easily share with friends (or tease them if they look funny in one).
If you have comments, obviously you are welcome to leave them on the Xconomy fan page just like you may choose to leave comments at the end of any story on Xconomy. We might from time to time play around with fun things like reader polls, or post the occasional quick handheld video on Xconomy, which you can find and share on the fan page.
I still find plenty of things about Facebook to be pretty odd. While I personally pay attention and want to follow news on subjects like colorectal cancer, it doesn’t feel right to click that I “like” colorectal cancer so that I can get my news and commentary on it. Yeah, yeah, I know I sound like a crotchety old-school copy editor. I’m trying to get over it.
Anyway, please check out the revamped Xconomy page on Facebook, and perhaps even do us the honor of a “Like.” If you have comments, tips, questions, etc. about what we can do to make the fan page more fun and useful for you, please let us know. Who knows, if enough of you want to hang around here, we might start using terms like “poke” in everyday conversation. Or maybe not.
