- Having a plan can prove the objectives behind a social media strategy, as well as a way to measure progress.
- Allows you to:
- Discover and learn where your audience is
- Provide extra value to your readers
- Try things to see what works well and what doesn't
- Build relationships with influencers outside of organization
- BBC use social media:
- Newsgathering — Helps them gather more, and sometimes better, material; can find a wider range of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly
- **Audience engagement ** — allows them to speak to different audiences and to engage younger audiences
- **A platform for their content ** — it's a way of getting their journalism out there in short form, or as a tool to take people to the website, TV or radio.
- What to consider...
- What are your objectives?
- To increase readership online?
- To increase interest in particular journalists, columns or features?
- To appeal to new audiences?
- To increase subscriptions or app purchases?
- Who is your audience?
- Consider the demographic of your audience and shape your tone to these
- Newspaper's social media straegies are no longer just tied to Twitter
- Rather than newspapers pushing one-way updates, now using questions and sparking debates
- Facebook updates with photo are proven to be more engaging — how will you utilize this?
- Use OpenGraph
- Open questions can be easier to moderate
- Calls to action are effective for creating dialogue.
- What platforms to use?
- Facebook
- All content must be conversational or easy to share and Like
- Event-based content "Who's going to..."
- Great place to showcase interactive content
- Easy to track engagement
- Twitter
- Can be topical due to the time sensitive nature
- Share links and video
- Quick and easy
- Great for breaking news and live reporting
- YouTube
- Visually engaging content
- Good for reports from the scene
- Good for SEO
- Video channel must be eye catching and make people want to subscribe
- Flickr
- Visually engaging content
- Easy to host user generated content from community
- Can engage with other accounts and share Flickr content through other channels
- Who will be responsible?
- Do dou want to use specific employees to manage outbound communication?
- Or do you intend to include everyone within the company to help you deliver your message?
- How do you police that use of social media amongst employees?
- How will you engage?
- Evening Standard "Pictures of the day" FB galleries
- Cover It Live
- How do you measure success?
- Increase in community, brand mentions and website traffic?
- Engagement more useful than simple brand awareness -- social reading is an example of where this can be important
- Improved reputation and influence?
- Improved CTRs and engagement rates?
- Have you defined your desired results and timescale to achieve your goal?
- Have you detailed which metrics you want to achieve, and the tools you need to use to measure your success?
- Some tools
- Twitter Feed -- link a blog directly to Twitter. It's like Tumblr used to be!
- HootSuite -- Like Tweet Deck. Can do scheduled Tweets, web-based. Also has analytics.
- Bitly -- URL shortener with analytics.
- Crowdbooster -- Top retweeters and impressions; various Twitter-related analytics.
- We Follow -- find influential tweeters
- How not to use Twitter
- Don't spam hashtags.
- Your audience is online
- 90% of consumers online trust peer recommendations; 70% trust opinions posted online by unknown users (Niemen)