That’s a lot of likes. A George Stephanopoulos-hosted town hall, designed to answer viewer questions about the threat of Ebola in the U.S., was a major hit for the network on Facebook, reaching more than 10 million people.
ABC says the effort was a response to overwhelming interest in the story. “We’ve been inundated by questions about the Ebola virus on all of our platforms and wanted to connect and answer what we could,” said Subrata De, ABC News VP of Multi-Platform Newsgathering.
“The network’s newsroom was able to react quickly to the public’s demand for more information about Ebola and produced this event in just a few days,” writes Facebook’s Beth Loyd:
George Stephanopoulos anchored the event and guests including ABC News Chief Medical Editor Richard Besser answered more than a dozen questions asked by people on the ABC News and Good Morning America Facebook Pages. ABC News promoted the town hall on-air during Good Morning America, posted a call-out for questions on its Page, and then streamed the event live on ABCNews.com , gma.yahoo.com and Facebook.