A south-east daily has used Facebook to help highlight the hunt for a missing 15-year-old schoolboy.

The Reading Evening Post set up the group ‘Help Find Missing Schoolboy Jonathan Marques’ after the youngster disappeared on his way to school in the town on 6 January.

Membership has climbed rapidly, now standing at over 760, while the newspaper has added a downloadable poster, video and updates.

The group has been driving visitors to getreading.co.uk with Facebook referring more traffic than the BBC, Yahoo! and MSN.

Deputy editor Hilary Scott told HTFP: “What the Facebook site has done is help broaden the search.

“Thames Valley Police have widened their search for Jonathan and on the Facebook site many Reading people who work elsewhere in the region printed off the posters to put up in their workplace and towns across Berkshire.

“We have also monitored how many posters have been downloaded from our website and the numbers are impressive.

“A high-quality poster was distributed to all our news outlets who displayed them on our A-boards and we also printed the poster in the paper for readers to cut out and display.

“We approached Pubwatch, whose members see 85,000 customers through their doors every week, and posters are up in all its bars and pubs. Reading Buses have also put the posters on every bus in their large fleet.”

Police have been searching waterways and streams near where Jonathan was last spotted amid fears he could have plunged through the thin ice while attempting to take a shortcut over frozen water.

And tomorrow a march retracing his route to school is taking place, led by his family and community members. The Evening Post has helped to organise a bus to transport marchers to the start of the route.