When news organizations use – and abuse – social media
I finally had a chance to join in #journchat on Twitter last night. It is a conversation among journalists that takes place from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Mondays in which @journchat, the moderator, introduces questions (some of which come from other chatters) for journalists of all concentrations to discuss.
The fourth question was this: When is social media NOT the answer for your industry?
Like many of the #journchat questions, this one got me thinking. Despite the obstacles a news organization faces in terms of creating a social networking policy, there are very few disadvantages to social media in the journalism industry. It’s yet another way to reach out the Web, connect with readers and aggregate your content.
But there’s still a strategy involved. In my mind, one of the bigger disadvantages for news organizations using social media is when they abuse it – that is, when they post content recklessly without thinking about how to get more people to click and read.
Hence, my response:
“When news orgs spout 20 tweets to news stories at a time, thinking people will actually click on all of them.”
See the example on the right (the best I had at the time of writing this). While I greatly respect the staff at The Bay City Times from visiting its newsroom several times, its Twitter usage could use some work. It tends to roll off between 5-10 tweets at a time to its news stories throughout the day, particularly in the morning. Not a good strategy when you’re trying to connect people with your content.
You should aim for people constantly clicking and retweeting what you link to rather than simply hooking your account up with, say, Twitterfeed and plastering the site with consecutive links. As a Twitter user with a short attention span, the more consecutive links I see, the less value I see in each. They’re just Web updates.
Back to the #journchat. Fellow journchatter Sue Anne Reed brought up a point in response, when I said the “Twitter abuse” is a problem: “If ppl are annoyed, they will unfollow. It’s a great barometer on whether you’re doing something right or not.”
That is true — to an extent. I haven’t unfollowed @BayCityTimes. Therefore, I raise this question: If I’m following @BayCityTimes but not clicking any of its links, how much value is there in me being a follower?
This is why, I think, follower counts are overrated. Following on Twitter is a click of the button. That’s it. It is easy, particularly for new users, to start following people and not interact at all with them, whether it is through replying to their tweets, retweeting or clicking on their links. Unfollowing somebody takes more legwork, and most people don’t care enough to do it.
Want to truly gauge how effective your Twitter account is? Track your bit.ly links, for example, and see how many retweets you’re getting on your stories.
Furthermore… while I see a place for news organizations having Twitter accounts and centralizing content on the Twittersphere, I still don’t think it’s the most effective way to connect readers with your content (see my earlier post on giving Twitter “the human touch”). You have to put a face behind the tweet. It comes right back to personal branding and putting yourself on ground level with your community.
During a staff meeting last night at Central Michigan Life, I asked every reporter and editor to begin using Twitter, if they haven’t already. The benefits of using Twitter as a journalist is a topic beaten to death. But another benefit is to put extra faces behind retweets of @CMLIFE work. Every click counts.
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Incredible post Brian…
In the role of Interactive Managing Editor with Barrington Broadcasting/Interactive I am charged with thinking of and developing stratgeies to merge social media with the traditional delivery of online content to our audience. Twitter has been a very touchy area for me. Coming into the broadcasting arena (which I think is shifting to “broadsharing”) from the design thinking space – I can clearly see some of the obsticles that broadcasting identities face when leveraging Twitter. You hit the nail on the head (IMHO). Twitter streams are NOT RSS feeds (which is the easy way out) yet they are a way to get at the ground level with the audience.
I thank you for writing this post and I will be sharing it’s contents with everyone I know! Thanks Brian!
Vincent Hunt
My personal pet peeve — as far as abusing social media goes — is the kind of stuff Rick Sanchez does on CNN. The stuff that Robert J. Elisberg complains about here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/news-for-twits_b_175699.html
On the subject of tweeting links to all your headlines, I would argue that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with doing that — you just shouldn’t make it the focus of your organization’s MAIN Twitter feed. Instead, register @YourOrganization and @YourOrganizationHeadlines, or something along those lines. The main account can be used for delivering breaking news, interacting with the community, seeking information, and so on. The secondary account can just notify people when there’s something new on the Web site — the Twitter version of an RSS feed. Not everyone will want to subscribe to that feed, but not everyone has to.
I follow the Twitter feeds of some Web sites that do tweet every update. I enjoy it because often they’re sites that I otherwise wouldn’t think to visit on a regular basis. For instance, following @OHNewsroom has resulted in me visiting overheardinthenewsroom.com a lot more than I used to.
Obviously it has to be done right — there’s a paper near here, for example, that obviously automates the process, and the result is that occasionally the system will latch onto a cutline instead of something more sensible. As a result, they end up with things like an election results story being tweeted as “JOHN SMITH | THE NEWSPAPER Jane Johnson waits in line to vote with her daughter…” instead of “Johnson wins Anytown City Council election with 55%” or whatever. And that doesn’t do anybody any good. But I can see a headline-tweeting service being valuable to some people.
So, treat Twitter as a broadcast tool for sending out all your headlines if you want to — just don’t make that the only thing you do, and do it from a separate account so people can choose which they prefer.