Why Journalists Should Use Twitter Too!

This just in from one of my favorite media blogs, Journalistics

By Jeremy Porter

Reach – a journalist that shares links to their most recent content via an RSS feed, tweets or social bookmarking will get a lot more traffic to their posts than somebody that doesn’t use these tools. If you’re a journalist, and you’re not using Twitter to share links to your content, you’re missing a huge opportunity to engage new readers and ultimately strengthen the value you bring to your organization.

Feedback – whether voluntary through blog comments, thumbs up/thumbs down feedback, or solicited feedback from users, social media gives journalists more insight into how their community is interacting with the content they produce. It’s a two-way communication model that is relatively new to the world of traditional media. If I were a professional journalist today, I would love to have this type of feedback on the content I’m working so hard to produce every day.

Sources – there are literally millions of people using social media today. If I need a source for a story, they’re only a tweet away. You can’t beat this feature of social media. Journalists can dramatically expand the range of sources they can pull from for any story, while significantly reducing the effort required to find a qualified source quickly.

Measurement – some organizations share Web analytics data with their journalists, some don’t. If you use a blog with Google Analytics or an RSS feed like Feedburner, you have instant access to detailed statistics on your content. You can learn how readers are discovering your content, how they are sharing your content, and which articles or posts your readers love or hate the most.

Branding – social media enables journalists to develop their own personal brands. Journalists need to find new and innovative ways to separate themselves from the other journalists in their organization. Everyone is competing in the news environment, and those that leverage social media have a competitive advantage to build their personal brands in association with the outlets they produce content for.

Job Security – in times of trouble, it’s the journalists with the largest and most loyal readership that should be kept on staff. This isn’t always the case, but it can’t hurt to have a huge social media following on top of reader survey data that says your content is the best. Journalists that drive the most traffic and readers enable the media outlet to realize more revenue opportunities. For this reason, social media goes a long way towards promoting job security for journalists – if leveraged to its potential.

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