The new “follow me” functions, in beta test for some 10 days, were announced 4/19 in a blog post by Huffington Post social media editor Rob Fishman. They allow users to fan, like and follow individual reporters and bloggers for the site, both on HuffingtonPost.com and concurrently on Twitter and Facebook. Readers can also follow a specific topic in the news by clicking a button at the top of a news story. Posts from the writer or stories related to that topic will show up in a user’s Twitter stream and will also appear in their Facebook news feed, with links to an automatically generated topic page.
RBR-TVBR observation: Obviously a great way to increase a site’s clicks: just let social media engines do the work, while at the same time allowing the reader a whole new level of personalization for their use of the site and their social media personas.
