E-Media Tidbits

facebook.com The Orlando Sentinel's savvy participation in Facebook increases site traffic and expands stories.

At the Orlando Sentinel, we're constantly seeking to optimize our key stories to get additional Web traffic. We've been doing this by making sure our story headlines are Web friendly so they get picked up by search engines, and we also regularly submit links to our stories to social recommendation sites like Digg, del.icio.us or Reddit.

Breaking news editor Roger Simmons and senior online editor John Cutter decided to see if they could drive traffic by placing links to our stories in related groups on the social networking site Facebook. Their first test was with the University of Central Florida's "watergate" episode last Saturday -- when the school ran out of bottled water in the third quarter of its opening-day game amid temperatures eclipsing 95 degrees. There were no water fountains in the school's new stadium.

On Tuesday one of the Sentinel's education reporters broke a story on our site that the school was responding to the water uproar by pushing ahead with plans to immediately add 10 water fountains before the next home game and 40 more fountains before the end of the season.

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Cutter and Simmons went on Facebook and found a UCF student group called Knights for Free Water, which had more than 1,200 members. This group was created to seek the addition of water fountains to the stadium based on the opening-day fiasco.

We added a link in Facebook to our breaking story on the water fountains. That story finished as the fifth most popular story on our site that day, with nearly 7 percent of the referring domain traffic coming from Facebook.

We've also added links to our stories in Facebook groups supporting Andrew Meyer, the University of Florida student who was tased Monday by police at a John Kerry speech. Again, those links helped increase our traffic.

Guest contributor Mark Russell is managing editor of the Orlando Sentinel.