Regular readers of the site may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot more news items as blog posts in the last months and that a new tag, WSM FB has appeared on them. That tag indicates the item was original written for the WSM Facebook page.
Regular readers of the site may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot more news items as blog posts in the last months and that a new tag, WSM FB has appeared on them. That tag indicates the item was original written for the WSM Facebook page.
Since the early summer we’ve started to treat the WSM Facebook page as if it was our newspaper. I’ll write up the reasons why at a later date in details but essentially we started this after the page reached 20,000 followers at the time of the last Dublin Anarchist bookfair and the posting stats made it clear that some posts were reaching 10s of thousands of people. Up to that point we had mostly posted articles to the WSM website and then posted a link to Facebook, now we are doing this almost completelty the other way around.
It’s an experiment thats working well for us, within the next 5 weeks we will have 50,000 followers and we have reached as many as 1.5 million people with a single post. But the main benefit is that now we can report on news as it is breaking and routinely reach 20 or 30,000 people. From time to time I’m cpooying pieces from the page over here to archive them as Facebook is useless for finding or sorting old posts.
Those familar with my writing will notice that sometimes the later part of these articles makes use of chunks to text from other articles I’ve written in the past. Thats generally where I want to add some theoretial or historical background to the news under discussion, the requirement of rapid publication and the way FB obscures old posts make recycling a reasonable option in my opinion even if it does feel a little like cheating.
WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )