How to Add Social Media to Your Workflow
By Susan Mernit, @susanmernit
One of the most common excuses journalists give for not using social media more regularly is the fear it will take up too much of their time.
“But I just don’t have time to be on Facebook or Twitter constantly,” is a common refrain. Or, “I just can’t keep up with all of it; I have too much to do.”
The secret to using these tools successfully and consistently is to “time-box” your work and make social media a part of what you do every day.
Here’s what the daily workflow for using social media might look like:
Early morning
- Check social media sites for new tweets, postings or comments that may require action. (30 min.)
- Craft new Tweets and Facebook posts for the day, focusing on links to new content, questions for your community and information and images you are curating from other sources. Optimally, this will be 3-6 Tweets and Facebook posts. (15 min.)
- Post new content to Twitter via Hootsuite or Co-Tweet. You may also want to schedule tweets to post automatically throughout the day. (10-15 min.)
- Publish some of your new content to Facebook pages, and “Like” everything you post on Facebook (5 min.)
- Browse your website while logged into Facebook and “Like” the new content. (5 min.)
- Send any photos to Flickr that need to be added to a set; promote new sets via Twitter, Facebook and/or Tumblr. (10 min.)
- Every few days, check your number of followers on Facebook and Twitter, and strive to recruit new followers. (5 min.)
TOTAL: 1-1.5 hours
Late morning/lunch time
- Search for retweets and Facebook comments or likes that you may need to respond to; reply to direct messages and replies and add followers if relevant. (10-15 min.)
- Identity any posts you need to retweet or share with your audience and craft responses to posts by others. (10 min.)
TOTAL: 20-25 minutes
End of day/early evening
- Check again to see if there are any new comments or tweets to respond to. (10 minutes)
- Create and share any new links from others you wish to curate/commenton. (10 minutes)
- Search your Google news reader and/or Twitter stream to see if there’s anything you need to address tonight—or want to work on for the morning. (10 minutes)
- Respond to comments on Facebook, direct messages and replies on Twitter. (10 minutes)
- Add followers if relevant. (5 minutes)
TOTAL: 45 minutes
If you wish, you can do a later evening check, or just start up again in the morning. Also, vary the amount of time you put in if you have a launch, a special program or are in build mode.
The best way to stay motivated to maintain this schedule is to set goals. These goals should be outcome-driven so you can focus on measurable tasks. Set goals for the day, the week, or the month.
Examples of goals:
- Increase retweets and interactions on Twitter and Facebook to four per day for each 500 followers.
- Achieve five “likes” for new content or posts and three new followers per day on Facebook.
- Increase referrals from YouTube to website by 2% per month.
- Bring Facebook into the top three referral sources to your website, with time spent metrics for Facebook referrers equal to that of direct site visitors.
- Increase Twitter referral traffic to your website by 2% per month.
By Paul Bass, Editor, New Haven Independent
Reporting
Facebook, and to a lesser extent MySpace, prove to be a gold mine in finding crucial information for some stories. It led us to the story of how the man accused of murdering a Yale graduate student was engaged to another woman at the time. (There was extensive information about that on her page.) We accessed the writings of a Russian emigre college student who was the victim of a mysterious murder; the writings revealed a double life he was leading on the streets. And the links among various people’s Facebook and MySpace pages helped us nail down a story about key figures involved in a federal investigation into mortgage fraud and real estate flipping. Facebook is also a regular source of photos for us.
Civic engagement
At one of our sites, the Valley Independent Sentinel, we’ve found that readers prefer to post their comments on our Facebook page rather than directly on the website. Those comments tend to be more civil too, perhaps because people’s real names are used. This phenomenon does not occur on our other sites.
Also on the Valley site, readers use the Twitter feed to post right on the site breaking information about, say, car accidents and storm-related problems.
We’ve used Cover-It-Live to invite reader participation in breaking news events. For instance, the Valley site has people posting live about high school football games and election-day doings.
At the New Haven Independent, we used Cover-It-Live to have a panel of reporters and politicians hold a live discussion of a school reform forum we were simultaneously moderating; and then to have readers directly join the panel’s conversation and as well as post questions to (and get responses) from the politicians; we then did a follow-up story based in part on the discussion that took place there.
Distribution
We post links to many of our top stories on our Facebook page. As a result Facebook produces the second most referrals to our site (after Google).
In developing a new national beat on nanotechnology, we’re using Twitter hashtags to reach a far-flung potential network of interested readers.