Building a Twitter strategy

I took part in a webinar put on by News University today on Building a Twitter Strategy for Your News Organization. It was hosted by Ellyn Angelotti, the interactivity editor and an adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute.

Angelotti made five key points about using Twitter successfully for journalism.

• Be human. People appreciate the ability to interact with reporters as real people, not just faceless, lifeless bylines on top of stories.
• Start and continue conversations. Twitter is great for getting people talking about a subject and keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion. Sure, the sample size is small, but for informal research it can be useful. It’s also great for soliciting comments.
• Use Twitter for crowdsourcing. More than one head is better than one, most of the time. People on the Web can respond to a question you have and help you find the data, links, people and other answers you need. More than that, giving people a mission or goal motivates them, and most of the time they more than glad to help and be a part of the journalism process.
• Use Twitter to get the news to people in a format they want. People these days expect that the news will find them, so it’s better to put the news out through as many media as possible.
• Engage with the audience. Meet new people and see what they are saying about your brand. This almost goes without saying. Any smart company is monitoring these social networks to see what people are saying about them.

Nothing groundbreaking for people like me, who have been thinking and reading about Twitter and journalism for a long time, but for those who are just getting started with Twitter, it was probably pretty instructive.

Angelotti also listed a few useful Web sites that help us learn about Twitter and use Twitter more effectively.

• TwitterSheep — a site that searches the bios of your followers for common words
• WeFollow — a site for finding experts on Twitter
• TwitterCounter — a site for comparing yourself to other Twitter users
• Twitalyzer and TweetStats — sites for doing some analytics on Twitter

It should be noted that the information you get from some of the stats sites like TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer and TweetStats are all to be taken with a grain of salt. Twitter is a big monster and is notoriously hard to track.

I did take a few good ideas out of the webinar. First among those is to once again redesign the wallpaper on the Chronicle’s Twitter page. Right now, it has our logo, but some of the other news sites Angelotti showed did something brilliant with their wallpaper. They filled it with text telling people how to get in touch with the paper through other means. I’ll be doing that to our page shortly.

Another good idea is to sit down and seriously think about what we want to achieve with social media technologies like Twitter. From there, we can develop a plan and then some guidelines for how we should be using the service to our best advantage.

Related posts:

1. Richard Sambrook: Transparency is the new objectivity, and the Internet is not your enemy
2. Washington Post columnist on why reporters should use Twitter
3. Web first or not?
4. Dabblers go home; journalists need to be social media leaders