Introduction to Social Management -- Alison Battesby

Allows you to:

• Discover and learn where your audience is
• Provide extra value to your readers
• Try things to see what works well and what doesn’t
• Build relationships with influencers outside of organization

BBC use social media:

• Newsgathering — Helps them gather more, and sometimes better, material; can find a wider range of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly
• **Audience engagement ** — allows them to speak to different audiences and to engage younger audiences
• **A platform for their content ** — it’s a way of getting their journalism out there in short form, or as a tool to take people to the website, TV or radio.

What to consider…

• What are your objectives?

  • To increase readership online?
  • To increase interest in particular journalists, columns or features?
  • To appeal to new audiences?
  • To increase subscriptions or app purchases?

• Who is your audience?

  • Consider the demographic of your audience and shape your tone to these
  • Newspaper’s social media straegies are no longer just tied to Twitter
  • Rather than newspapers pushing one-way updates, now using questions and sparking debates

  • Facebook updates with photo are proven to be more engaging — how will you utilize this?

    • Use OpenGraph
    • Open questions can be easier to moderate
    • Calls to action are effective for creating dialogue.

• What platforms to use?

  • Facebook

    • All content must be conversational or easy to share and Like
    • Event-based content “Who’s going to…”
    • Great place to showcase interactive content
    • Easy to track engagement

  • Twitter

    • Can be topical due to the time sensitive nature
    • Share links and video
    • Quick and easy
    • Great for breaking news and live reporting

  • YouTube

    • Visually engaging content
    • Good for reports from the scene
    • Good for SEO
    • Video channel must be eye catching and make people want to subscribe

  • Flickr

    • Visually engaging content
    • Easy to host user generated content from community
    • Can engage with other accounts and share Flickr content through other channels

• Who will be responsible?

  • Do dou want to use specific employees to manage outbound communication?
  • Or do you intend to include everyone within the company to help you deliver your message?
  • How do you police that use of social media amongst employees?

• How will you engage?

  • Evening Standard “Pictures of the day” FB galleries
  • Cover It Live

• How do you measure success?

  • Increase in community, brand mentions and website traffic?

    • Engagement more useful than simple brand awareness — social reading is an example of where this can be important
  • Improved reputation and influence?
  • Improved CTRs and engagement rates?
  • Have you defined your desired results and timescale to achieve your goal?
  • Have you detailed which metrics you want to achieve, and the tools you need to use to measure your success?

Some tools

• Twitter Feed — link a blog directly to Twitter. It’s like Tumblr used to be!
• HootSuite — Like Tweet Deck. Can do scheduled Tweets, web-based. Also has analytics.
• Bitly — URL shortener with analytics.
• Crowdbooster — Top retweeters and impressions; various Twitter-related analytics.
• We Follow — find influential tweeters

How not to use Twitter

• Don’t spam hashtags.

Your audience is online

• 90% of consumers online trust peer recommendations; 70% trust opinions posted online by unknown users (Niemen)