We finally understand this ‘viral’ terminology, first hand.  Since the launching of Crossville News First in January, we have seen our page grow by leaps and bounds with thousands of visitor’s to our News Page.  But this week set a record.  As you might have guessed, the number of viewers to any ‘news’ page is driven by it’s content.  As of today, June 1, we have 5,485 subscribers to Crossville News First Facebook – which is a portal to our news page Crossvillenews1st.com, where the stories are actually stored.  But from these 5,485 “Likes”, many thousands more viewers are reached when our subscribers ‘share’ a story with their friends.  Typically a story, depending on the interest, will be shared by up to 200 Facebook users and could reach up to 60,000 viewers. Well this week there was a lot of sharing going on.   Our  TOTAL REACH analytics from Facebook reports a whopping 396,500 unique viewers were ‘served’ our Crossville News First  Facebook page this week.  We’ve been astonished at this to say the least.  And the story that has attributed most to this massive ‘Reach’ was about a tick.  The story posted last week about a rare tick virus that can be fatal has been shared 3,497 times which thus far has reach almost four hundred thousand people. But it wasn’t alone in getting the attention of readers, our story about the missing woman in Hermitage Tennessee, Nikki Burgess, has been shared 408 times reaching 46,000 viewers.   But today’s Total Reach of 396,500 people is simply over the top, especially when our goal is to primarily reach Cumberland and surrounding counties with our news and information.  We have been humbled by the many subscribers (likes) we’ve received in only four months. All our ‘likes’ are organic too, which means we’ve not purchased advertising to promote our page, again because our News Page is targeted primarily to Cumberland and surrounding counties.   We continue to work to bring you important, relevant and interesting news and information.  And this week we will be launching a very new and life-saving personal severe weather alert system that is the absolute best way to reach people when severe weather strikes the Cumberland Plateau. And of course we’ll be ‘broadcasting’ the General Election live on our page this August, not to mention video of important governmental meetings and informative ‘Meet the Candidate’ interviews this summer.  We realize our ‘viral’ state will calm down this week to a more normal figure (unless the news changes it) – but we do want to thank everyone who ‘Likes’ our news page and hope you tell your friends about Crossville News First.