Writing for social media
The editorial decisions I made and why I made them
One of the first things I did after Tuesday’s lecture was to publish an image on Twitter using Canva. As Bradshaw (2018) highlights, when tweeting, it is important to “provide more information than characters alone” (p.121).
Twitter has a character limit so brevity is something to be mindful of. I accompanied the graphic with a short sentence:
Canva also allows you to fit the graphic with the correct dimensions which is a very useful tool.
Whilst I was pleased with how it turned out, improvements can be made for next time. The alignment of the two graphics is slightly off and I should have made better use of white space.
Twitter is a convenient platform and the limitations in characters should be turned into a positive. I will be taking inspiration from Friedman (2014) who says Twitter is “all about economy of language”.
This from the BBC is a great example of using emojis and sparing characters to make a punchy tweet 👇
Analytics and timing
Twitter analytics showed me some interesting information. I had never really looked at this aspect of the social platform before. But, it was obvious which tweets performed better than others.(Performance I am putting down to the amount of interaction).
Work by Rogers (2014) highlighted the effectiveness of images and videos when tweeting.
Rogers, and former Twitter data scientist Douglas Mason, analysed over two million tweets. Their findings showed that images, videos and hashtags make tweets “richer” and that they lead to an “impressive boost in the number of retweets.”
From looking at my output this past week, I can see that I had more retweets and engagements when I used different types of media.
I briefly looked at my data and filtered tweets by media and non-media. The past 10 tweets which were just text received 80 likes and two retweets. Comparing this to media tweets, I received 123 likes and four retweets.
Using the work and examples of others
My audience on social platforms — especially Twitter — is one which has an understanding of data and journalism.
This piece of work by Carmen Aguilar-Garcia was particularly impressive. Examples like this are the kinds of things I want to appear on my feed.
Furthermore, simple interactions such as likes and shares should not be overlooked and they are a large part of my social activity (Bradshaw 2016).
