Facebook and Twitter

Have your papers started doing this? How do they use them? We've just been linking our stories and blogs, I'm wondering what other ways people are using them to expand their coverage.

 

We use them in a number of ways. We post quotes and questions of the day. This day in history and the early weather report. We also update them throughout the day with any breaking news, or late information that won't get into print. We have a fair amount of traffic and interaction. This is all new to us, so we're still experimenting with them.

 

There must be at least a dozen threads on this already.

At my last shop, we used Facebook to communicate to students who were locked in their classrooms after a person was rumored to have been in the building with a gun. It was a pretty cool way to get a story.

 

I'm curious. How did you use facebook? Wouldn't you have to know a student and pass the information on to them? How would you disseminate news to the masses?

 

Maybe mustang is popular and has a lot of friends, Drip.

 

I was thinking along that line too.

 

I've started a twitter feed and a Facebook page for my coverage of one of our local teams.

Twitter is seeming more useful, because you can tweet updates from practice as well as post links to stories, but the facebook page, where I post links and occasional thoughts, has more followers thus far.

 

I just started a Facebook account for our Sports Page and within two weeks we surpassed my newspaper's long-standing Twitter account for # of fans. It's already helped me catch an erroneously reported score (from another publication), although I was hoping to see more interaction via comments and our discussion board.

Seems to be a useful tool however, and it takes off quickly. We use it primarily to link to stories on the website and to inform people of what they can find in the next print edition. We also post a weekly discussion topic and are looking into other ways to promote interaction with readers.

Also, a helpful tool for providing frequent score updates (end of each quarter) to those fans at home...we offer that during our playoff seasons. We also post photo albums of "Special Events" promoting our photo reprint CDs, although this has been slow going to this point.

 

Twitter and Facebook is fine and good if you have time. Most newspapers just post updates that say breaking news, click here. Or Johnny Endofthebench had a real good practice running lines for the class D high school basketball team.

 

Once you're on Twitter be sure to set up a search with your town's name in it and hit regularly. That's how we found out about a major fire a few days ago. Somebody tweeted they'd just called 911 to report the fire, and our photog beat the fire department to the scene.

 

Ditto with Facebook searches - You'd be amazed at what you can find out about towns in your coverage area just from searching groups. I found out about the closing of a local restaurant a month before it happened, and of course, there are tons of stupid local high school and college kids who openly have pictures of themselves boozing it up.

 

We do a lot with our Twitter, but have yet to establish a Facebook page (we're a 18K daily). Our Twitter following is slowly but surely starting to grow (we are in an education-deprived city where the newspaper is actually still relevant) and we're still trying to progress our online following.