We have continued to increase our focus on social media outreach. Our Facebook pages have continued to grow, with the “Friends of Coal West Virginia” page now reaching over 9,200 fans and averaging approximately 40,000-50,000 page views per week. We have also seen several posts reach 10s of thousands of people – one has now been seen by more than 330,000 people.
Our other pages have also experienced significant growth, with the “Friends of Coal Virginia” page now topping 5700 fans and Citizens for Coal (on which we have posting privileges) topping 2,300 fans. Altogether, it can safely be estimated that our pages are reaching more than 100,000 people per week. Our growth rate exceeds 10 percent, with us adding approximately 300 new fans to the FOC-WV page in just this week alone.
We are rapidly integrating all our social media, including FLICKr, Twitter (both wvcoal.com and friendsofcoal.org have a Twitter feed), and we are evaluating other social media platforms, including a blog, which we are developing and a social media management tool (Sprout Social) which will allow us to manage all our social media efforts on a single platform.