MMJ Masterclass 34: Getting started in social media
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The essential guide to doing great journalism on Facebook
First, why use Facebook for your journalism?
When I’m teaching social media I find the first hurdle is that many journalists are suspicious of it as a publishing platform.
They get Twitter, but with Facebook they’re not so sure. It's just too social for them, too much about friends sharing stuff that's very personal to a small circle.
But I think it’s a great platform. Here’s why.
Facebook is beginning to move down the Web 3.0 route that underpins our interest, as journalists, in social media, and which is covered in depth in Masterclass 2 of MMJ.
I talked there about how readers were creating personalised news stands of the material they were interested in.
That's exactly what users are able to do with Facebook.
On Facebook, users can become fans of us, of our content, and welcome our Facebook publishing stream onto their own news feed page.
There, our content is delivered alongside material from their own social circle.
The result is a hybrid of personal communications from friends and material from organisations that an individual likes, enjoys, values, and wants to follow.
So Facebook is a very special place, and a very significant one for journalists to work in.
But we need to learn how to use it most effectively.
I posted an introduction to Facebook here If you are a subscriber to MMJ you can check it out, to become a susbcriber, buy the textbook, in ebook or paper form, here
I won't go over that ground again, but try to give an overview of the latest advice and thinking about optimising Facebook for journalism.
One key thing.
Keep your personal Facebook presence separate from your journalistic presence. I have separate accounts, so there is a complete separation. Others simply create a page for their journalism on their existing account.
Next: Top tips. Guidance for journalists from Facebook
The power of How
Here’s a demonstration of the power of how.
I use Timely to publish some of my tweets, and the performance data Timely gives you is a useful insight into which tweets have worked – in terms of getting clicks and retweets – and which have not.
Looking through that data I discovered a theme – that tweets with a How in them tended to do better than those without.For example, a plain-statement tweet got no clicks, but "How to work for Empire Magazine" got 19:
Of the following three tweets, "Secrets of the journalist-entrepreneurs: How they built their own jobs" got 18 clicks and three retweets that took my reach from 676 up to 3,349; "Adam Westbrook on how to build your own job in journalism" (from an interview with Adam, who is always a popular name to put in a tweet) got 27 clicks, three retweets and a reach of 3,349.
The dud was: "Journo or jobsworth? Why not build your own job in journalism?" With no clicks:
By contrast, "How to thrive as a freelance" got 28 clicks and I retweet. But “Your first job in broadcasting – advice from industry experts" got zilch:
The free version of Timely I’m using doesn’t give me the location of those who click on and retweet my posts, but I’m guessing the 64 who clicked, nine of those who retweeted “How group curation works on Wikipedia” at 5.46am UK time were actually overseas:
The other thing the successful tweets have in common is, I guess, a promise of value. I think the anomaly of my most successful tweet that doesn’t have a How in it – “Scoop.it – a great tool for journalists who want to curate a topic long-term” - with 79 clicks, six retweets and a reach of 3,927 - is down to that:
So now I’ll promote this blog post with a series of tweets via Timely, using How in some but not others, and if the results are illuminating I’ll update this post accordingly.
