BBC introduces a new feature in Facebook
One of the world’s largest public service broadcasters has made a step to make its presence much bigger than earlier in the world’s largest social network, Facebook. As a part of its campaign it has decided to change the way people access news online. In order to start this change it has rolled out its new BBC News Control Panel for its official Facebook Page. With this BBC is giving more control to the people over the news they see on their news streams.
These days the relationship between news media and social media has become a complex but important one. We take what we like and don’t like to take more than that. BBC has understood this point very well. So it has launched this new news control panel allowing user to customize what news has to appear on their news streams.
Previously most people visited the site by typing in the web address of the website i.e. bbc.co.uk/news and few directly arrived to the main article by search engine or a link from friend’s email. But today’s scenario is entirely different less than 50% of the 8 million visitors see the front page of the website and the rest arrive directly to the story page. This massive change is because of the social network services such as Facebook and Twitter. The click to BBC links from Facebook has grown by 14 times since 2008. Almost 25% of the total 1 million individual users start their BBC news website journey via a link on Facebook every day.
With all these stats in mind they have given a makeover to the BBC News Facebook Page. In order to use this new control panel, users must first like the official page. Then the users will be presented with this control panel on the top. In the control panel users will find several categories of news such as country wise, business, politics, sports, technology and so on with a like button against the category. The user just have click on the like button on the stream of the news he/she wishes to get in the news feeds. It’s as simple as that. Hope the other media outlets also offer similar customization options.
