There you have it, the media is continually evolving and all those who talk gibberish and deny the importance of Social Media, well they ought to be send back in time into the age of ignorance. Today the Financial Times announced that the Economist is pushing its efforts to have its presence felt across Facebook. All this is a new strategy to begin early next year and the aim is big. The Economist is planning to have 500,000 fans on its Facebook fan page and eyes over 750,000 followers on Twitter.
This is isn’t impossible, or even even close to difficult given that it already has more than 180,000 fans there. So why exactly this sense of urgency? Quite obviously the reason is to work on a platform that helps user engagement much faster and prompt enough to help create discussions around topics as well as having each fan coming over to the Home Page too. So are they going to allow accessibility to its site with Facebook Connect? I think they should, given how serious they are about Facebook, other than that, they definitely need to make sharing articles on Facebook more prominent and easy (that share button is quite difficult to spot on).
How can this be done?
I have read that the Economist is planning to do some spending to gain more fans on Facebook. Sounds quite an impressive move and something which is more fruitful than bringing any losses. Other than that the other thing it can do is actually do some spending on ads to promote its fan page. Seriously, bagging half a million users from the 350 Million Facebook has. I wont recommend it to diverge its attention on Twitter, rather focus on Facebook. The reason is plainly the fact the social network has grown considerably, I mean it is far more engaging, you have the freedom to share content and have users to share it immediately with others.
I am not sure if the Economist will exceed its expectations but it is a very intelligent move. Plus its reputation globally will actually make things much simpler and the ground is very fertile for traffic to grow big.
