The Palm Beach Post‘s cousin paper in Texas, The Austin American-Statesman, has been an innovator in using Twitter for breaking news.
Photo by Trekkyandy / Flickr
The Stateman’s social-media editor Robert Quigley, with help from other tweeters, uses @statesman to:
• Interact with followers regularly, which builds up familiarity and good will;
• Use Twitter aggressively during big local breaking news;
• Use basic news judgment to ensure information from Twitter is verified before using.
Read a great blog post here to learn more about how Statesman uses Twitter to help cover breaking news, including a case study of how Twitter helped the paper cover a pilot’s suicide attack on the IRS building in Austin.
Closer to home
Here at The Post, Tory Malmer, the main tweeter for our primary Twitter page, @pbpost, interacts with our followers and keeps an ear out for news and developments.
For instance, last week a @pbpost follower asked via Twitter why traffic was stopped and no one could cross the center bridge to Palm Beach.
Tory alerted breaking news reporter Eliot Kleinberg, who made a call and got a feed up on the Web about the bridge’s mechanical problems.
Tory then relayed the information to our followers, including mentioning the original questioner by her handle so the woman would be sure to see it. Click on the thumbnail below to view a larger image of the back-and-forth interaction that day:
But The Post’s main Twitter page isn’t the only place where the action is. We have more than 5,500 followers among 34 Post Twitter accounts. One of them is @pbpSchools, by our education reporters.
During a newsroom transition last fall, @pbpSchools was put on autopilot, and it simply sent out headlines and links to school stories and blog posts in rather robotic fashion.
A automated “twitterfeed” isn’t the worst thing in the world. It was better than turning off the account after it had already built up a couple hundred followers. But robots don’t thrive in the social media world. In the entire 6-month period that @pbpSchools didn’t have a human behind the wheel, it got only 6 interactions (retweets and mentions) from followers.
When education reporters Cara Fitzpatrick and Kevin D. Thompson jumped in and started adding a human touch in late March, the followers of @pbpSchools noticed.
In just the past three weeks, @pbpSchools has had 35 retweets and mentions. That’s a 4,900 percent increase in interaction (!), attributable somewhat to education being a hot news topic with Senate Bill 6, but mostly because followers were being communicated with and interacting with real reporters.
Here are just a few examples of Twitter followers interacting with The Post via @pbpSchools (click the image to view larger):
Cara’s been active on Facebook, too. Below is a peek at some of her activity on the popular Testing is Not Teaching Facebook page, a Palm Beach County group with more than 11,000 fans that’s proved a decent source of sources and story tips for Cara:
More social media tidbits from this week:
• Mashable had a good blog post this week about how journalists are using Twitter and Facebook to spot trends, find story ideas and connect with sources. The post includes helpful tips.
• The Library of Congress announced that they’re digitally archiving every public tweet since Twitter started in March 2006.
• Twitter this week rolled out “Promoted Tweets,” its attempt to make money with paid ads. NYT’s report on the feature explains: “If a new movie is getting negative reaction, the studio could use the ads to link to a positive review, for example.” Twitter answers questions about Promoted Tweets in a FAQ-style blog post.
• McDonald’s has appointed its first social-media chief.
• This will come as no surprise to those of you who check Facebook and/or Twitter before checking your email accounts (guilty as charged), but social-media usage has officially surpassed email usage. A big part of it is likely because people are simply emailing each other on Facebook. And it’s not just kids, either. I know many people in their 40s, 50s and older who use Facebook as their primary email account.
