The Facebook and
Twitter toolbox
A hammer can’t do the job of a screwdriver, and a screwdriver can’t do the job of an Allen wrench. Facebook and Twitter likewise can be incredibly effective at their specialties.
Neither comes with a set of instructions. Fortunately, the public media professionals who tinker with these tools are happy to share how they work best.
For listening to the public and learning
Social media allow you to witness conversations as they happen. On Facebook, a great way to watch a conversation is to start one.
Facebook users especially love answering questions, says Jill Shepherd at Chicago’s WBEZ. She’s realized that “Facebook is a place for people to get their thoughts out on things.” She says the station has made a habit of asking listeners their opinion of a noteworthy recent event. Even if listeners didn’t get their news from the station, Shepherd says it’s still great that they associate WBEZ with learning more about the event, and know they can discuss news on its Facebook page.
Twitter, on the other hand, allows you to see what people are saying about a particular topic. Submit any search term to search.twitter.com, and you can learn what people are saying about your state, your city, your station and recent events.
For creating communities
News organizations can create as many Facebook pages and Twitter accounts as they can keep up with. Different pages and accounts can highlight an organization’s specialties and beats. They can also attract far-flung audiences by topic, not just geography.
On Twitter, you can grow an audience or a community by finding and interacting with people who are talking about a topic you cover or a program you broadcast. For example: WBEZ grew its Twitter account by finding and following Twitter users who tweeted about This American Life or Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.
Twitter has been called the “great equalizer.” Anyone can interact with anyone. You can retweet other users’ messages or respond to something they’ve just tweeted. Inserting the @ symbol and a username in a tweet allows you to address a fan you otherwise may never have met. Adam Schweigert, an interactive producer at Indiana Public Media in Bloomington, quadrupled IPM’s social media fans and followers in less than a year. He designated a Twitter account for each locally produced show and followed users who displayed pertinent interests. “On Twitter people like to subscribe to some narrow thing that interests them so they have the ability not to be overwhelmed by a ton of updates,” he says.
Schweigert used the station’s more popular Twitter accounts to re-tweet posts from its less popular Twitter accounts, keeping a story alive and helping the lesser accounts gain followers.
Schweigert also designated a Facebook page for each show. He says if you can scrounge together an extra $100, Facebook makes it incredibly easy to attract 300 fans — people who have clicked that they “like” your page. You can target ads by interest, hobby, characteristics or location. “If you run ads that are targeted well enough, you can get a lot of value for really not a lot of money. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there that stations don’t really quite grasp,” Schweigert says. The small investment jump-starts itself: After a page gets around 2,000 fans, can keep growing on its own. When Facebook users “like” a page, the site notifies their friends who tend to have similar interests — and the page goes viral without a lot of work.
For building better relationships
Social media isn’t just a way to push out your own content. It’s a way to show your audience you’re genuinely interested in interacting with them. On both platforms, it’s easy to interact. Just answer questions. Answer requests for information. Respond to conversations or comments posted on your page.
Vincent Duffy, news director at Michigan Radio, says listeners use Facebook to get to know the station better. They don’t just comment on stories; they ask for more information, sometimes requesting to see original documents or sources. Sometimes they’re curious about the people they hear on the air: “We’ll say, ‘We had the office Christmas party,’ and someone will comment, ‘Pictures!’ Anything that makes us more real to the audience, we would put up,” he says.
Duffy and three other producers at the station check Facebook frequently. He hopes that Facebook users feel there’s someone to answer their requests and questions through Facebook if not 24/7, “at least 22/7.”
For serving your audience’s
information wants and needs
Active social-media users at stations know the audience will eat up content on their favorite topics whether the station produced it or not. Justin Kauffman, a senior content developer at WBEZ, says the station’s main Twitter account retweets “a lot of things that a Chicago-centric audience would be interested in,” including stories produced elsewhere. In a day, he says, WBEZ tweets links to 15 to 20 of their own stories, and 10 to 15 from other sources. This tells Twitter fans that WBEZ is dedicated to giving them interesting and useful information, and it may have helped build a Twitter community for WBEZ. In December 2008, the station’s main account had 700 fans. Now it has more than 15,000.
Tara Cavanaugh earned her M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri this spring. She runs an audio poetry site at http://thepoetspeak.com. She can be reached at
Web page posted July 15, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC
