Social Networking in the J-Classroom
How to create a social media strategy to use Facebook and
Twitter for journalism
Why social media?
• It’s where your readers are.
• Increases traffic to your site
• Transparency in news gathering
• Immediate feedback to make stories better
• Connects site to people and stories
• Markets your “brand” and keeps readers thinking about the site as a source of information
On your site
• Include a way for readers to share content on your news site on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Message boards
• Social networks on news sites
• Twitter live feed
How to use social media to enhance online journalism
• Break news before print deadline
• Keep track of sources (students, teachers, administrators at school to keep up news and events)
• Crowdsourcing: Gather info from many people to make a story better or add information – includes finding out reactions to your stories thru comments, links, etc.
Create a discussion
• While it can be great for drawing readers to your site and getting ideas, social media allows the journalist to make news into a discussion rather than a one-sided conversation.
Transparency
• Share behind-the-scenes stories about the reporting of a certain article
• Share what stories and projects you are working on to give readers a preview
• Break news• Communicate with other journalists• #wjchat every Wednesday evening• Live coverage of events• Bring back to website to read stories• Nearbytweets.com to find users in your
area• Breakingtweets.com to see trends
Live Coverage
• Create a hashtag # for the event.
• Give description of what’s happening on the scene.
• Use a human being rather than a feed of all headlines (use twitterfeed.com for that)
• Reply to followers and retweet interesting links• Establish relationships – ask questions and
answer them.• Show some personality• Include links• Be instructive: 5 people on campus you should
know.
• Follow teachers, students, parents, administrators, local news outlets
• Better to have a profile rather than a page because you can friend people rather than rely on fans
• Videos
• Photos
• Discussion questions
• Respond to posts to keep conversation going
Location-based social media
• Foursquare
• Gowalla
What’s your strategy?
• Appoint a social media editor to:
• Create a plan: What will you post about?
• Set a schedule for regular posts.
• Set aside time to respond to questions and comments.
Social bookmarking
• Digg- Users collectively decide which stories are newsworthy. Can use for story ideas to see what’s popular. (Caution when digging own stuff.)
• Delicious
How to promote content
How to interact with readers
• Thank tipsters publicly and give credit
Social media ethics
• Individual staff members with twitter accounts should identify themselves as affiliated with newspaper
Getting around the censors
• Text tweets
Sources
• The Digital Journalist’s Handbook by Mark S. Luckie, author of 10000words.net
• Journalism Next by Mark Briggs, author of journalism20.com
• Jeadigitalmedia.org
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