Twitter

OK, I'm sure a lot of people on here hate Twitter, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of papers that have success using it with sports? If so, how is it used? I'm wondering if this is better for Twitter than for the papers using it; i.e., Twitter gets all the hits instead of the paper's Web site. What is the best ways people have seen papers make use of this, and is it worth even trying? Are we actually helping our paper or are we just helping Twitter? Is there a way to use Twitter to get people directed to your Web site? I don't know much about tweeting, so I have no idea how this stuff works.

 

Yes, it works for sports. I post score updates during games, advertising your ability to get updates on your cell (we already do live in-game updates on the prep sports blog).
I also tweet my stories and blog posts, driving traffic to the web site via tinyurl.com.

 

What appgrad said. TSN, its French-language affiliate RDS, TheScore and several other sports media outlets are using it for that very purpose. They post a headline, link, and a URL ... just like most other media outlets, sports or otherwise.

 

We have a feed that automatically populates our Twitter feed with all our columnists with a sweep ever hour.

We're gaining three or four users a day, in an accelerating manner. I think there's some value there.

 

What those two said.

We use Twitter to post links to our stories (which makes up about 90 percent of our tweets, a "Here's what we're reading now" feature) to drive traffic to our site. We use it to generate discussion about our paper (using #hashtags). And we've even culled sources from our Twitter followers (for instance, by asking them "do you know somebody who's rebounding after being laid off? Send an e-mail to joe.schmoe@ourpaper.com).

You have to use a tool right for it to be effective. (You know, don't go out and tweet a fucking funeral. :) Learn how to use it and it can do good things for you.

 

Auto feeds suck. Make sure there is a real person to respond to @replies. Using it as an RSS dump will piss a lot of people off.

 

Gannett is having sports departments twitter for the NCAA tournament and conference tournaments. One person or so from each rag twitter and it forms a huuuugeee list of basketball updates. Today was the first day and it was really cool. I was rather impressed.

 

But the IT guy said that all you need to do is dump the RSS feeds into it and you're set.</bluefont>

 

Blogs and Twitter feeds to the rescue!

 

It's another free way to draw people to your site. Set up a Twitter, promote it occasionally on your blog, throw an update up once a day with a TinyURL link to your blog. Once you set it up, takes five minutes a day. Don't overwhelm people with a ton of updates, but it's a smart complement to a newspaper blog.

 

I noticed that Gannett papers have been doing well with Twitter. The Clarion-Ledger and Cincinnati come to mind as doing well with it.