Race to become first to 'like' Queen on Facebook

The Queen is said to have personally approved the plans for her page, which will go live tomorrow at 8am

At 8am an official British Monarchy page will be launched on the world’s most popular social networking website, allowing users to connect with the Royal family online.

Although it will not be possible to befriend the Queen or her relatives personally, website users will be able to state that they “like” her page.

There will be a public list of friends of the page, prompting a race to become the first to press the “like” button on Monday morning.

The British Monarchy page will provide a hi-tech version of the traditional court and social announcements, detailing the daily engagements of members of the Royal family.

Fans will also be able to comment on these announcements.

Buckingham Palace says it does not know how many people will look at its Facebook page, although the official @BritishMonarchy account on Twitter already has 70,148 followers.

There is also TheRoyalChannel on YouTube, the video-sharing website, which has 32,418 subscribers and whose films have been watched 8.3million times over the past three years.

However fans eager to look at the Queen’s presence on Facebook bombarded an unofficial page on Sunday, perhaps unaware that the real site was yet to go live.

The number of people who “like” the unofficial page rose from 16,293 to 18,613 on Sunday afternoon, after details of the official page were included in weekend newspapers, with many of them welcoming the Queen to cyberspace.

Buckingham Palace will not attempt to remove unauthorised tributes to the monarchy.

"I don't think that's in the spirit of Facebook," said a spokesman.