Maximizing Your Social Media

A summary of social advice from Mandy Jenkins Contact: mandyjenkins@gmail.com

Overall Social Media Tips Identify yourself: On all social media services, use your full name, say what you do and who you work for. Use a real photo of yourself. Writing tweets/status updates: When sharing news on social media, keep in mind you’re selling your work. Tell readers why the story matters and why they’d want to read it. Mistakes: If you make a mistake on Twitter or Facebook, follow it up with a corrected update as soon as possible. Delete only if you must. Don’t Fight With People: Address your critics, but don’t get into nasty public fights. Take it to email if need be. Be responsive: When people ask questions or send you comments, respond to them as you can. If you don’t have time right away, wait until you do. If they asked a question others may be interested in, you might want to retweet their question or work it into your response to give context. Find Your Voice: Think about what sort of tone works for what you do and how it fits your personality. If you don’t want to be personal, you don’t have to be, but you shouldn’t be a robot, either. Learn by Example: If you’re still finding your voice on social media, it helps to follow other journalists who use the tool in a way you like, then follow their example. Who to follow/friend: Competitors, coworkers, your sources, those who reply to/share your posts on social media. Tools for Monitoring & Measuring Success Klout: Connect your Twitter, Facebook and other accounts to get a score between 0-100, generally the middle is where to be. Track your score over time to see your progress. SumAll: Shows follower growth, reach, shares and more for most social networks.

Bit.ly: Shortens links, gives detailed metrics on how your links are doing.

Twitter

Account management: Programs like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite make it easier to watch social streams, schedule posts and shorten links in a hurry.

Lists: Make Twitter lists to help make sense of your Twitter timeline.Make lists of sources, coworkers, other news sources, etc. at twitter.com/lists

Finding people to follow on Twitter: Twellow.com; Wefollow.com; Muckrack.com (for finding journalists)

Facebook Facebook subscriptions: To use your regular Facebook profile for work, one option is to turn on subscriptions, which allows readers/sources to follow your public updates without being “friended”. This feature can be found in your account privacy settings. Friends lists: Put your Facebook friends into lists based on your relationship – be it personal or professional. You can then target specific Facebook posts to those groups of people. Facebook.com/bookmarks/lists Interest Lists: Add politicians and community groups to interest lists to get their Facebook updates without “liking” them. Facebook.com/bookmarks/interests Google+ SEO: Get an account and fully fill out the profile (with a photo) to help your name and your stories promoted in Google searches. Be sure to add links to your other social media accounts. Google+ Authorship: Set up your Google+ account to promote your stories in searches here: plus.google.com/authorship