His use of Twitter varies. He tweets recruiting news, announcing reported scholarship offers to high school football and basketball players. He live-tweets sporting events, from the Miami Heat and Florida Marlins to high school softball. I interacts with his followers by asking questions such as, “Name your top five NBA players of all-time.” He’s also been known to post the occasional joke, such as this lighthearted photo.

On The Post’s PBGametime Facebook page, he and his fellow high school sports writer post photos, links to stories that don’t come through the feeds and interact with users. The page has 1,995 fans and counting.

Other examples:

• Tiger Tracker: Day 1 at the Honda Classic
• Tiger Tracker: Day 2 at the Honda Classic

Tiger Woods, whether we like it or not, is the most popular golfer in the world. When he entered his first Honda Classic this March, Greer followed him. Literally. He went hole-by-hole, step-by-step, ranging from 10 to 200 feet from Tiger, tweeting his every move and blogging every hole. The blog was wildly popular, gaining more than 2,000 page views each day that Greer posted.

Greer did these running blogs while still doing the Tiger Tracker – not sure how his phone handled it:

• Inside the ropes: Day 3 at the Honda Classic
• Inside the ropes: The sights and sounds from the Honda Classic

When he wasn’t in Tiger’s pocket or annihilating the Honda Classic’s delicious media dinner spread, Greer was following the rest of the tournament, posting photos and commentary from around the tournament, which has become extremely popular for fans and non-fans alike.

And here are a few of his post-game blog posts, which have become a fan favorite:

• Game Rewind: Thoughts on the Glades Central-American Heritage Classic
• What changed the game and other observations from the Glades Central sideline:  There’s no team like Glades Central. Look the school up on Wikipedia. It has produced the most NFL players per capita of any high school in America. And the players are as entertaining as they come, both on and off the field. Not only are they good, but the Raiders provide the kind of motivation needed to write lengthy post-game blogs at 2 a.m. on a Friday night. These are great chances for Greer to go deeper into a game that the quickly written and rushed game story that we need for print.

This is blogging that happens when Greer’s mind wanders:

• Inside the EA Sports’ NCAA Football ’12 ratings for area players
• Area coaches take you inside Glades Central-American Heritage
• A Florida high school football plus-three playoff? Why not?: Nothing worse than a blogger gone mad, right? These are three posts that give Post readers something to think about – whether it’s inside-the-lines football analysis or fun video-game studies that get people talking.

Then there are the PBGametime videos, the weekly high school football videos that preview the week’s upcoming games. Greer and his partner write the script Monday nights and film the show on Tuesday mornings. Their costumes and lines are their own creations, and they have a ton of fun doing it. These videos became so popular, they eventually brought the demise of our Game of the Week videos, which were previously quite popular for our high school football fans. Let’s just say this: Last year’s season finale involved Greer, a cheerleading uniform, pom poms and a busy intersection.

It’s not often that we get to set a new standard for coverage.

But we did just that with our coverage of John Goodman’s high-profile DUI manslaughter trial.

One day in, it was clear that our initial plan to go with one reporter both for print and online was not going to be enough if we wanted to do it right.

Criminal Courts Reporter Daphne Duret’s level of interaction with readers on a live CoveritLive chat during the first day’s proceedings created such a high demand that we were forced to bring in another reporter.

Enter Civil Courts Reporter Jane Musgrave to pick up the live chat duties and keep the momentum going.

By the time it was all said and done, Social Media Editor Tiffini Theisen reported the following:

“Cumulatively, for the 12 days of the trial the chats had 93,998 readers, several thousand of those no doubt repeat viewers, including a core group of several dozen who served as the “leaders” of an ad hoc online community that formed around discussion of the trial on PBPost.com.”

And readers appreciated it. Just a small the multitude of the comments and questions (which Jane answered) that show how much readers appreciated the live coverage and connecting with Jane:

• Jane, do you know in what level prison would he serve his sentence if he is convicted?
• Jane, do you have any clue as to why the prosecutors didn’t refute the malfunction of the Bentley by having a Bentley representative testify?
• Jane, How does this make Bentley the company look? Doesn’t this big bad press to there vehicles? Aren’t they going to rebut this?
• @Jane, I noticed Goodman goes to sidebars with his attorneys. I know he has that right. In my area, I’ve never seen a Defendant do that. Is it common practice in FL?
• Jane, how much is this proceeding COSTING the residents of Palm Beach County (ballpark)???
• Jane, could Rose have bailed instead of being dropped by the defense but defense is merely saving face?
• Thanks again Jane & Daphne for your reporting during this trial
• Thanks Jane. I remember earlier that the defense team stated that there case is based on the Bentley malfunctioning because of acceleration? Perhaps they are not going to mention it like that.

Even streaming live video from the courtroom didn’t slow down the growth in readers on the daily chat.

View the archive of the Goodman trial chats here.

The niche site has a loyal audience, including 1,600 Facebook fans, folks who post about their own memories of Palm Beach County and in return get relevant and quirky facts from the place we live.

With Facebook’s new Timeline, Michelle posted historic events as Facebook Milestones relevant to Palm Beach County dating to 1696, when Jonathan Dickinson shipwrecked off Jupiter Island.

Michelle’s Timeline takes readers on a trip through local history, tracing such events as:

• The gathering of 87 residents On Nov. 5, 1894 at The Calaboose on Poinsettia Ave., who met to incorporate the place we now know as West Palm Beach;

• The opening of the first local movie theater in 1908 in the Jefferson building on Clematis Street, where “The Great Train Robbery” was shown;
• The quiet integration of Delray Municipal Beach in 1962, where “whites and Negroes mixed both in bathing and on the beach with no difficulties”;
• Contemporary history, including the opening of the “Leaky Teepee,” the first West Palm Beach Auditorium in, so named because of the shape of its roof and the fact that it leaked, and the annual National Enquirer Christmas tree display in Lantana.

“To pull the page together, Michelle did amazing research, combining hundreds of descriptions of historical events and people with photos, scans and newspaper clips,” says her fellow research librarian Niels Heimeriks. “The result is fascinating and engaging — relevant yesterday, relevant today and relevant tomorrow.”

Through her hard work on the site and social media, Michelle has built a healthy community, succeeding in getting people to contribute content constructively.

Unlike some of the comments on our main site, the comments on the Historic Palm Beach website and Facebook page are thoughtful and on-topic — hard to come by these days.

• When health writer Stacey Singer covered Palm Beach County’s first free health care day on a Saturday in February, you might say she just phoned it in. In addition to writing her story for the web and print, Stacey used her iPhone to post live updates on her popular Twitter account throughout the day as she was reporting, including tweeting her iPhone photos of patients she talked with. She covered the event in real time as 12 clinics saw more than 1,100 people for free, capturing the stories, the faces and the pain of Palm Beach County’s ailing and uninsured. See a summary of her live coverage here.

• Education reporter Allison Ross used Facebook to live-blog the Palm Beach County school superintendent choice. By spreading the word, in the three days leading up to her chat, the Education Matters Facebook page she shares with Jason Schultz gained as many new fans as the page normally gains in a month. Allison also took photos of the meeting on her phone and uploaded them into a Facebook gallery on her page. Recap Allison’s Facebook chat here.

Image via Wikipedia

Hello PBP Facebook page admins:

Every Facebook Page will switch automatically to the new Timeline layout on March 30, so we all need to start preparing NOW. If you like, you can manually switch over before then.

Some of the most important features are:

• You will need a large cover photo (851 x 315 pixels). Start thinking now of what you’d like it to be. (Cover photos cannot include price or purchase information, contact info such as website & email, references to FB actions such as Like, Share, or an arrow pointing to these features, or any call to action such as “Tell your friends.” And this should go without saying, but your cover photo also cannot be someone else’s copyrighted image.)
• Your profile photo remains. A logo continues to work best for this.
• Pinned posts. Lets you keep important posts at the top of your Page. A post can be pinned for only 7 days.
• Starring and hiding stories. Gives you more control over what appears on your Page. Starring makes a story bigger.
• Milestones. Go retroactive by building a history of key moments of your “brand.” Milestones must have photos, and will have a flag icon. Location, exact day, and story are optional.
• You can change dates of posts so that relevant content can appear in the past.
• Pages can now receive private messages from fans.

Here are some resources for more information.

• NYT (showoffs) has already already enabled Timeline:

http://www.facebook.com/nytimes

• Here are a few others from various media companies:

http://on.fb.me/yt0Wkk

• To manage your new “activity log”:

Go to Manage at the top of your admin panel, and use the drop-down menu for each story. Save your best posts as “Allowed on Timeline.”

• Please bookmark these: Facebook’s guides to the new Pages

http://www.facebook.com/about/pages

http://www.facebook.com/help/pages/new-design

Feel free to contact me with any questions you have, or stop by the Learning Lounge for Facebook Fridays resuming 3/9 from 10-noon and 2-4.

Related articles

• Facebook Timeline Coming to Pages Soon: Preview Mine (professorjosh.wordpress.com)
• Timeline for Facebook pages: a complete overview of new features (insidefacebook.com)
• How To Use Facebook Timeline For Brand Pages: New Feature Details (techcrunch.com)

But our readers seem to love it, and that’s what keeps me going. Every week I connect with local people who are thrilled to have a place on PalmBeachPost.com to share their stories and read about their neighbors. Every week, I am reminded that people in the community like and respect The Palm Beach Post brand.

And the fact that someone at The Palm Beach Post is listening to them, interacting with them and publishing their stories, I am convinced, makes them feel more connected to their hometown paper.

To me, that’s what social media is all about – much more so than things like being the first to switch to Facebook’s new Timeline. (The modern profession of “social media” is filled with people so obsessed with being seen as the first to be in the know and the first to use the latest tools that they often forget about the audience they’re supposed to be connected with.)

Anyway, part of the Community Post channel is a reader-generated blog, moderated and edited by me. I get several dozen submissions a month, many of which turn into print stories, listings on our entertainment website, or guest blog posts. The latest submission made my day.

It’s from an 80-year-old woman who’s been married 61 years “to the love of my life,” designs websites on the side, and is writing and self-publishing her first book.

“I feel rather bold writing to you but I thought perhaps you’d be interested,” she emailed me, then outlined the plot of her novella and signed off by expressing worry she appeared “egotistical” for writing.

We exchanged a few emails, and I asked her to keep in touch when her book was published and available to purchase online. She agreed and added: “Writing a book was something I always said I’d do ‘someday.’ When I reached 80 I figured, “If not now, when?” I try to encourage people, especially in my age group, to try new things and keep learning.”

Such an inspiring woman! I already feel uplifted by her, and I know our readers will, too.

Here are just a few things she did in the past few days to help out with social media while I was attending the Online News Association conference in Boston.

Talk about the weather

A simple photo post with an engaging cutline got our Facebook fans talking. Click to see all the interaction, among the highest we’ve seen on any one image.

Pouncing on a hot topic

From being an avid consumer of social media herself, Amanda knew everyone was talking about the recent Facebook news feed changes. So she capitalized on this by using Storify to curate public posts about what people were saying on the topic.

Amanda embedded the Storify on our site and included a link at the bottom to our news story.

Reader of the Week

Finally, Amanda helped by choosing and posted our Reader of the Week. This is a popular new-ish feature on our Facebook page that recognizes local people who use social media to share news, photos and video with The Palm Beach Post and who help spread our content virally on social networks.

Amanda had also embedded the reader’s video onto a page on our site.

Thanks Amanda for your good social media instincts! Amanda’s just one of several web producers who do a good job with social media for our site. A social media editor can’t do it alone; you have to have a good team.

Related articles

• Use Storify to Quickly Create a Blog Post (lockergnome.com)
• Storify and Journalism: An Exploration (annasandersreporter.wordpress.com)
• Loyal, longtime readers praise The Palm Beach Post on Twitter, Facebook (webupthenewsroom.com)

Now, Facebook has added this tool to its own Insights for page admins, and today I saw it in action for the first time.

Clicking on “View 1 share” brings this pop-up box:

Facebook isn’t showing me anything I could not find through a regular search on Facebook or another website. Lisa Isler-Karney’s post is public, just like a blog post or a tweet, because of the Facebook privacy that setting she chose. But it’s a nice perk for a Facebook page admin to see the sharing activity right from our own Wall.

Still, only a trickle of readers are taking the bait so far: Just 54 locals have added me to their Google+ circles, up only 4 people in the past month. We may see more interaction when official brand pages are enabled.

If G+ is able to eventually rival Facebook’s spot as a mainstream social network, it has the potential to offer better search capabilities and better analytics. Not to mention its innovative features like intimate video-chat Hangouts.

But that still remains a big “if,” despite its rapid growth. (Google Plus garnered 25 million users in less than a month, and while some data suggest most of the early adopters were young men in the technology field, more students have been hopping aboard, suggesting the Google Plus demographic may be heading in a more mainstream direction.)

Meanwhile, the monster that is Facebook shows no sign of slowing. The site now gets 1 trillion pageviews a month worldwide, according to DoubleClick.

Facebook has also been scrambling to improve its privacy controls and sharing features, two of the touted advantages of G+. Another recent Facebook improvement is its news feed, which now groups posts by topic, giving it a clear advantage over Google Plus’ still-cluttered feed showing repeated posts.

Many of the direct messages we receive are responses to our auto-follow note that asks new followers whether they are locals.

That morning, I noticed an email from a new @pbpost Twitter follower that was a little unusual.

The stereotypical image of a Twitter user is a young person tapping out text-like updates from a cellphone. But here was Palm Beach Post reader Richard Philpott of Boynton Beach – who tweets about politics and history – breaking the mold.

I decided to highlight Richard as our Reader of the Week for that week, and I posted his message to our Facebook page along with this note:

Anyone else out there been reading The Post for 40 years? Richard Philpott of Boynton Beach, a longtime Palm Beach Post reader, is now also keeping up with our news via Twitter on @pbpost. He’s this week’s Reader of the Week to thank him for his loyalty!

The responses, though they included the usual jokes and grousing, were pretty encouraging as several other longtime loyal readers came out of the woodwork: