Part 3
Multimedia and Facebook
Photos
The Texas Tribune’s Facebook page has photos from in-person events, from behind-the-scenes, and from fans wearing Tribune-branded clothes around the globe.
One of Facebook’s most useful features is the ability to embed photos, video and audio into your posts and include photo and video galleries as tabs on your page. Photos are also a great way to draw people into your content — and worth sharing as stand-alone posts as well.
Facebook offers a relatively simple photo-uploading process. Users have the ability to upload several images simultaneously and sort them into albums with descriptions and tags.
Robust photo galleries can bring attention to a page while extending the shelf life of existing content. Albums on your page can include images from recent stories broken down by beat, photos from your organization’s archives, special web-only photo collections and user-submitted images.
When posting photos directly into your Facebook library remember to tag people and groups that are relevant to the image. After uploading, Facebook will give you the option to identify people in the photograph. Click on the person’s face and then begin typing their name. These tags do not have to be people seen in the image. For instance, you can include the photographer, the event promoter, or the location. Tagging someone, if they are one of your Facebook fans or friends, will cause the photo to appear on the individual’s wall, notify them of the mention and increase the number of times your content is viewed.
Images should also include captions where possible and links to relevant content on your main website, such as a related story.
Video
While Facebook allows users to upload video directly to their sites, videos hosted on the site cannot be shared or seen by outside viewers and search engines.
The Texas Tribune’s Facebook video section includes an introductory video to the site.
A more effective method is to upload videos to sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo and then embed videos into individual Facebook posts by choosing the share function. Alternatively, you can include the URL of the video from YouTube or Vimeo as a post on your wall.
There are third-party applications that allow you to include video galleries directly on your site. While functionality varies by the application, most will allow you to feed videos from an existing video-sharing site directly to your page.
One, Video Lightbox, allows for attractive embedding. Tubepress also offers attractive video galleries. Searching developer sites connected with your CMS may reveal additional plug-ins. Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress all have options.
More technically advanced users may want to consider using Facebook Markup Language (FBML) pages as a way to include multimedia or create customized pages. After the FBML app is installed, HTML code can be used to embed videos or create interactive site features.
Examples of news organizations using this include The New York Times, which has built a customized app with the tool.
Freelance writer and photojournalist Reginald James’s favorite social media tools
I’m a freelance writer and photojournalist in Oakland, CA. My site covers a range of things but will soon focus on being sort of a “Black East Bay Express.” I’m a full time student, so in the near future much of my work will be curating. My favorite social media tools include:
Tweetdeck: This is a great platform for Twitter. It allows you to sort tweets into categories and by search terms. It also automatically updates.
SocialOomph: This allows you to schedule tweets for a time when you may not be near a computer.
Bit.ly: In addition to shortening links, this service tracks statistics on those links.
Facebook: It is the Matrix, but it’s the best way to reach many people. I’m actually (promising myself) to wean off because it tends to segregate the web.
Qwitters: See which Twitter followers have stopped following you.