Sunday, September 18, 2011

Journalists and Social Media: How Facebook is Making News

"How Journalist Are to Share News" by Lauren Drell focuses on how journalists are using social media sites to post their opinions and go more in depth on stories. This article talks about what to keep in mind while posting. Like how posts affect engagement, content should be diverse, coverage trends and when to post stories. According to Vadim Lavursik, journalist program manager, and Betsy Cameron, a data analyst, compiled the data to "provide journalists with some best practices and insights on optimizing their engagement and distribution on Facebook to better reach their audiences." This statement is very true since journalist can really connect to their audience through social media.

I like how this article gives percentages on viewer engagement depending on what is posted and when it is posted. It gives you an idea how to better promote stories on your blog. What you post affects engagement such as a question asked. When a journalist posts a questions they are looking for viewer feedback. If a journalist gives a piece of their mind, they are more likely to receive 20% more online engagement from viewers. Asking fans to read up on a topic or inviting them in behind the scenes of what you are reporting stimulates interaction. And being clever by using puns and catchy phrases attracts 18% of viewer engagement.

The only fact that I found to be common knowledge would be the percentages on viewers looking at pictures posted. Of course viewers will be more likely to view a blog if it has pictures. Any visual media will promote engagement, if every post was text only that would be pretty boring. As a whole this article is interesting to read. It gives good tips on how journalist use social media to get their point across. To read this article go to the link below:
http://www.mashable.com/2011/07/18/facebook-marketing-journalists/

The next article I read was "Vadim Lavursik: How Journalist can make use of Facebook Pages". This article focuses on how private journalists are using Facebook to their advantage. It basically states things that everyone already knows about Facebook. Such as, the news feeds, social storytelling, personal vs. professional, and showcasing multimedia. Most people know that new feeds are like having your own newspaper; you can post basically whatever you want. Whether it is a article you read on CNN or what you ate for dinner last night. The idea of social media is to post out information that you would like the public to know.

However, one topic that I did find interesting was building your journalistic brand. How people have shift from the institutional news brand to journalists' personal brands. Prior to the web, the journalist's personal brand was mostly limited to columnist and the TV anchors who enjoy lots of face time. By having a personal brand it makes the readers understanding how credible the reporters are. Basically taking the brand logo away from the journalist and replacing it with an actual face. Both reporters and online readers can openly communicate and talk about the stories they reported. Besides this section on personal branding, this article focuses on too many things that people are well aware of on Facebook. To read this article go to the link below:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/vadim-lavrusik-how-journalists-can-make-use-of-facebook-pages/

The last article I read on facebook as a news source was " Facebook Journalism 101" which pretty much broke every aspect down to using Facebook as a media source. To the point of giving way too much information. This is like reading a manual about how to use Facebook, most people can learn how to use the site just by using it. Don't get me wrong, this article states the percentages on audience engagement and explains personal branding too. But, it explains too much, also their percentages are a little different from the first article . For example:




  • Post that asked questions or user input: +64%


  • Call to read or take a closer look: +37%


  • Personal reflections or behind the scenes post: +25%


This article is perfect for someone just beginning to use Facebook and has never had any experience with it. It also combines a lot of the information from the first two articles. It is sort of like reading a text book on social media, packed with vocabulary, terms and statistics. I would most likely give this site to a much older person just learning the basics to Facebook. If you would like to visit this site, go to the link below:
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/61073681%20(up%20to%20the%20end%20of%20section%20V)



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