According to a 2010 analysis by strategist Jeremiah Owyang and The Altimeter Group, there are more than 172 tools used by businesses to share, manage and evaluate social media. Most of us would agree that a core set of tools are at the heart of this new kind of communication.
2011 Social Media Landscape by Fred Cavazza
Together, these tools comprise what many call the social media ecosystem. As a group they allow users to:
- Publish
- Repost
- Share
- Discuss
- Network
The core stack of social media tools used by many journalists include:
- Facebook, a social networking site
- Twitter, a communication form based on 140-character messages
- Flickr, a photo-sharing site
- YouTube, a video-hosting site
- Vimeo, a video-hosting site
- Scribd, a document-sharing site
- Slideshare, a Powerpoint-sharing site
- Tumblr, a micro-blogging site
- Posterous, a micro-blogging site
- Hootsuite, a dashboard to use multiple social media accounts
- Tweetdeck, a dashboard to use multiple social media accounts
- LinkedIn, a professional networking site
What does this mean for you?
It means that rather than having to learn how to manage 172 tools—a terrifying thought—you really need to get a handle on three to five tools that will be core to your social media strategy.
Let’s go through each of these tools to show you how to get the most out of using them.
How Beat Reporter Mai Hoang Uses Social Media
Mai Hoang, [email protected], http://maiphoang.tumblr.com
I am a business reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic, a 35,000-circulation daily newspaper in Central Washington state. As part of my job, I also keep a blog (along with corresponding Twitter and Facebook pages) called Shop Talk to chronicle my area’s retail and restaurant news and trends. I always work at finding new ways to share stories and social media helps me do that.
For Twitter, I use two programs that allow me to sort incoming and outgoing tweets easily. I primarily focus on HootSuite, which is easy to use with a simple interface. I can manage all my Twitter accounts seamlessly, although I have accidentally posted things to the wrong account on occasion.
I use Tweetdeck as a back-up on my mobile phone but don’t like the desktop program. The best part about HootSuite is that you can access it from any computer.
For Facebook, I use the Facebook mobile app. It used to be a struggle to post things, but a couple of updates have fixed nearly all the bugs and I post easily now.
How I manage my time:
- I try to check my social media tools about twice an hour — once at the beginning and one at the end of the hour. I take about 10 minutes each time.
- I use the “favorite” function on Twitter so I can read some later.
- I follow hashtags used by organizations or chats that I’m involved with (#AAJA or #wjchat, for instance) to get tweets I might have missed in between sessions.