captzulu said:
Asking if using Twitter generates significant revenue is kind of like asking if RSS feeds or covering city council meetings generate significant revenue. The way I look at Twitter, or any social media, is this: Twitter alone, or even social media alone, may not generate significant amounts of direct revenue for a news org. However, they are valuable tools for serving your audience. And you use these tools not necessarily because they generate revenue, but because they serve the readers, just as council meetings may not be the thing that make papers fly off the rack, but you still cover them because it serves your readers to do so.
As for what social media gives back to the news org, I don't know how much direct revenue it produces, but I think there are a couple more important things a news org gets, which might indirectly lead to more revenue:
-- Expanded reach/influence/reputation: If you use social media tools well, it'll enhance your reputation as a reliable and useful source of information, a place that's among the first to pop into your audience's mind when they're thinking about where to go to find info on X. I think that's important in an age when news orgs are competing with millions upon millions of information sources for attention.
-- Additional resource for reporters: If you build a big enough social media community (and one that actually interacts with you), whether in the form of Facebook fans or Twitter followers or whatever new app that hasn't been cooked up yet, you get to a point where you can start using that community to help you do your work better. Need to find some sports fans with unique pregame rituals? If you have a few thousand or even just a few hundred followers, chances are a couple of them would know someone who fits the bill. Didn't make it to the site of breaking news in time for pics? See if any of your followers did. Need to compile a report of roads blocked by toppled trees after a storm? Ask your Facebook fans to post what they've seen around the city.
These are good points. My trade pub has used Twitter, and it's worked out very well. Does it give us 1 million new readers? No. Success comes when the dribs and drabs start adding up.
One more point I would add is with Twitter, there is a lot of care and feeding. What's helped us is that we don't just put our stories up there and let them sit. We get the Twitter IDs of every source who has them so we can retweet them. No matter the source, they love the ego boost of being name-checked, and once we retweet them, they will retweet our story and send it out to a lot of eyeballs that would not have seen our own tweet.
We also retweet some of our followers' tweets that look interesting, and we make sure to pump up some names every Friday for Follow Friday. We also pay close attention to hashtags and trending topics so other will stumble upon us.
Finally, we convert every URL to a bit.ly for our Twitter postings so we can track exactly how many readers are coming from our feed, or the feed of anyone else who is retweeting our bit.ly.
It also sounds ridiculous and like a lot of work. But it's worth it, and eventually it all becomes second nature. The best thing is, we now have people who are spreading the word about us, people who are not us, and that continues to expand our reach.
We're just starting Facebook, which is not as much work in the care and feeding. But it's one more place where you can get your stories to people passively, so they can see them and get to your site without having to go on it first. Basically, you might get people who wouldn't view you otherwise, and then have them start making a habit of coming by?
Can this all be monetized? At this point, who knows? But we all know more readers is better than less readers in any case.
