“Take every risk you can and experiment the hell out of it”
When it comes to social media strategies, there is no “golden rule”. But there a few things you might want to consider.
Social media can be frustrating, and social journalism* even more so. We want to engage our audiences, get them involved in every step of the journalistic process and sometimes — well sometimes, we fail.
This week, I interviewed the leadership team of the Brooklyn children’s museum (we wanted to talk about the neighborhood of Crown Heights, where the museum is based). Before I went, I asked my Twitter followers, what they want me to ask. And what came back was…nothing. Well, some likes and shares, but no answers.
A few days later, I asked my followers what I should do to welcome my 1000st Twitter follower (only 2 more to go!). I had the idea of inviting him/her for a coffee, but wanted to know what my followers suggest first, because that’s what be learn in social journalism: to listen to the community and not make assumptions of their needs…maybe, even if it’s hard to imagine, not everybody needs coffee? And what came back was…nothing.
So what are the options? Stop trying to engage? No, I’d rather go with Cynthia Collins, the social media editor of the New York Times, who was recently guest speaker at our CUNY’s metrics and outcomes class. She says:
“Take every risk you can and experiment the hell out of it.”
And while there is not one strategy that can be applied to every medium, or how Cynthia put it, “There is no golden metric”, there are some thoughts one might wants to consider when trying to build up a broader base of followers:
- Have a clear goal
- Define a strategy This should be based on statistics. Big media companies usually go for Crowdtangle or Chartbeat to look into the statistics. Watch out, this can be addictive. Facebook Insights can also be helpful: Find out who your audience is, where it is, and what they want.
At CUNY, we are applying this in our social tools class: We looked into the statistics of the queer outdoor NGO Venture Out Project in order to develop a strategy for them. Facebook lets you explore the performance of each post. Over the weeks, we can see that there was very little engagement with single photos posted from their trips. So we adviced them to make photo albums, which seems to work better. The most successful article ever posted was an article about a queer ranger, and this makes sense: Facebook is all about personal stories. But we should always keep in mind the timing: it was posted at noon, which is an odd time, the peaks for this site are actually in the morning and in the evening. We will now explore more with the lunch break time and see how that works.
- Emphasize What would your readers want to read about? You could even try asking them for their questions by using Hearken — we are currently using it for collection questions of our communities)
- Experiment Try different things at different times. Be creative and playful about it.
- Timing For most sights, engagement peaks in the mornings and in the evenings. People tend to work less in the evenings, that’s why this time is better for long reads and videos.
- Copy the best Okay, every employee at a small news company will start rolling eyes when being compared with big players like the New York Times. Still, we should look at best practices and see what of it could work for us.
“Tech, media, politics and sports do better on Twitter than on Facebook”, says Cynthia Collins, “and human interest stories do really well on Facebook.”
And if all this fails, just post a video with Justin Bieber in it. This always works.
*If anyone asks themselves what social journalism is, I suggest reading this article by Jeff Jarvis).
