When gathering all of the data for our piece about the comments on Facebook about the elections we noticed that there has been a delay between the VB announcements appearing on Twitter and them popping up on Facebook.
There are lots of examples, but here’s a selection of three to give you a flavour.
Official election result
Our story announcing the Andrew Turner win, published at 3:06 on VB – literally at the same moment they were announced in the counting hall. This story went from VB to Twitter also at 3:06am but took a further two minutes to hit Facebook at 3:08am.
Two minutes isn’t too bad, but when you want to bring important news to people, that kind of delay is noticeable (to us at least).
Five or six minutes delay
For an example of a longer period, the result ‘rumour’ post we put out in advance of the actual results. On Twitter it is posted at 2:59am, with it taking a full five minutes for it to appearing on Facebook at 3:04am.
The last example is the full voting results we put out at 3:14am on Twitter and 3:20am on Facebook. A six minute gap.
Check VB or Twitter first if you’re a News Nut
For most people the difference of five or six minutes means nothing, but for those who want the VB news as it breaks – the VB site and Twitter (how to sign up) are your fastest source of information.
