Facebook and the newsroom

That this is a topic in 2010 rather than 2008 pretty well sums up ineptitude of newspaper management.

 

I agree on both points.

This may be easier for younger reporters, but another way to help build your fan base is when your friend asks you to become a fan of their band, company, etc. you do that and then send a quick message mentioning you joined their page and kindly request they return the favor.

I have also found it very useful for double-checking the spelling of names since we know how much some coaches may struggle with spelling, especially of the opposing team.

 

Just started one for our sports page a couple months ago and it's taken off. Surpassed our newspaper's Twitter base in little more than a week. Seems to grow in clumps...a parent of a school's basketball team "fans" up, and you get a bunch of her friends to join, too. It's been a valuable resource, and I use it largely to feed web updates.

 

Depending on how you handle Twitter and Facebook, you might get a bigger bang from Twitter. I'm at a national trade pub, and our Twitter feed gives us a lot more traffic than Facebook. I think in part that's because we're a professional pub, but also it's because while more people might be on Facebook, you can get more engaged readers with Twitter, especially if you focus on certain topics. (For example, it's fairly common for newspapers to have a Twitter feed just for preps.)

The thing with Twitter is that it's a lot of work to do the care and feeding necessary to build that engaged audience. You can't just post stuff. You have to retweet others' stuff, and you have to post some outside things that might be of interest to your audience. And you need to talk to your audience, too. Done right, it's a full-time job on its own, which is why you see organizations making social media a full-time position -- it's marketing more than news.

The same is true for Facebook, although we tend to use that more to post just our own stuff, with the occasional link elsewhere if it's really big news that we haven't updated.

You might say, why bother with this, when Internet advertising barely exists on our site? Two reasons. First, it keeps your brand name out there. Second, as the eyeballs keep moving online, eventually Internet ad revenue will take off. Not like what you get for print, but that's where it will grow. And once it starts, you want to have a good site and an engaged audience ready to show off.

 

Tell your editor that this is the way modern people acquire farm animals and put together organized-crime families.