Facebook and the newsroom

We just recently did research on this, and I forget the exact numbers, but I believe about 65% of our audience was on Facebook. Twitter was something like 3%. Your tweets may be retweeted like crazy but it's still likely to have a fraction of the impact of a Facebook post.

 

If you are successful in getting a Facebook fan page, the first thing you should do is invite every Facebook friend you have to join it. Invite us SportsJournalists.commers (I'm a fan of at least two papers thanks to connections here). You want to make sure you have a base of users so that when people find your site, they think it must be popular.

Also, make sure to set up a custom URL so you can show up higher on search. It's very easy to do.

 

These are all great ideas. thank you guys.

 

Where did you do research on this? In the newspaper? On your web site? Not a challenge: seriously interested in knowing. Was it a scientific poll?

 

It was an outside research company hired to look at promotion. I believe they polled 500+ people - not sure how scientific it was. They found that the number of people we reach with Twitter is dwarfed by the number you can hit with Facebook. And anecdotally I can tell you that I maintain a Twitter feed for my newscast and probably 90% of the followers are PR people. Our station Facebook page seems to get far more "real people."

 

I disagree playthrough. It's still a great fit because you are still driving traffic to your site. Any promotion is better than no promotion. If you continue to post interesting headlines on facebook you are essentially "selling" readers on the idea of paying for the subscription.

 

It's a monster depending where you live. This summer when I was vacationing in NYC, we used Twitter to find out where the best streat meat vendor was. He had an enormous following and he helped his business.

For larger newspapers it can be succesful. I think the New York Times increased web hits by 10 percent through Twitter.

 

You're not going to sell everyone, and you'll probably piss many more off than you'd get to sign up. But if you get one out of 10 (or one out of 100, the number's not important to the point) who click to pay for a subscription, it's more than you get without a FB page. It's simple sales. It's all a numbers game and it starts with getting your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And as others have pointed out, it's really quick and easy to post a link so it's not labor intensive.

 

It's Free?

 

Same here. Wish it wasn't that way.