2012: what you were reading on the Bournemouth Echo (From Thisisdorset)

2012: what you were reading on the Bournemouth Echo

12:00pm Tuesday 1st January 2013 in Latest

It’s been an amazing year for the Echo online. More and more of you are using our website and we’ve had our best year ever for traffic.

Our Twitter and Facebook presence continues to go from strength to strength and the help and feedback we get from readers when a story breaks is making a big difference to how we handle our online coverage.

For the first time this year we’ve had live blogging software as part of our site, giving us extra flexibility to cover big developing stories.

The first time we used it was to cover the murder of Reece Menzies in July. Our rolling coverage ran for two days and featured live updates from the murder scene in Boscombe and also Bournemouth railway station, which was closed due to police activity relating to the investigation.

Since then we’ve used it cover events like the Air Festival, bring you in depth coverage of the Elliot Turner trial and the Jon Egging inquest, and to keep you informed when floods or accidents brought chaos to the roads of Dorset.

We think the live blogs are an excellent addition to our reporting arsenal, and with six of them in our top ten stories of the year, hopefully you agree.

So, our top ten most read stories were:

• Murder probe launched launched after man 'found decpitated'
• Fire at Lytchett Minster School
• Police hunt sex offender after Poole rape
• Murder probe: Police seal off Roumelia Lane in Boscombe
• Two die in car crash
• Cherries: Echo banned by football club
• Manhunt for dangerous sex offender live updates
• Wanted man Dean Goodwin arrested by police
• LIVE: The Emily Longley trial
• Police hunt for Dean Goodwin live updates

Our most successful month of the year was July with 4,494,257 hits, our second highest ever, and November, which saw record numbers of unique users (after August 2011) with 488,403.

The most read sport story of 2012 was the comment piece written by Sports Editor Neil Meldrum about our ban from the Cherries ground, which had 45,680 views and attracted 220 comments.

Our most watched was of the flooding at Longham Bridge on July 9, which was also the most viewed video across the entire Newsquest network in July with more than 17,000 views.

The most viewed gallery for the year was the school proms with 166,349 views. Other popular galleries included the Olympic torch relay across Dorset with 150,827 hits, followed by motorists caught on camera on their mobile phones with 99,475 views.

And our new In The Dock section has been consistently one of the most searched for items on the website generating over 2,100 searches since it appeared in April.

But it’s not all been about the serious news this year. A reader’s picture of the “face of god” in a mixing bowl went global after first appearing on the Daily Echo website. And who can forget when the Top Gear team came to town in October with a stuffed cat on top of a modified Fiat.

On social media, we’ve added more than 2,000 Facebook likes since this time last year – and our call for assistance in the hunt for Dean Goodwin was shared more than 2,000 times.

On Twitter we now have more than 12,000 followers.