Let’s Get Social

Last night I got this question on twitter, from an up-and-coming journalist

Who does the best social media? Including both Twitter (official station account and individual reporters) and Facebook.

I responded by saying:

That's a VERY tough question to answer. I don't think I could tweet in 140 or less, to be totally honest.

Each station has their own twitter and Facebook accounts and some reporters have their own twitter and Facebook accounts as well, but some news outlets are using the social media sites better than others.

Before discussing the Albany market, I want to shine a spotlight on the Boston television market. Almost every reporter at WHDH, 7News, has their own twitter account. But, there is also a main account –@7news– this account is updated continuously throughout the day with retweets of what reporters are talking about on their twitter accounts, updates of breaking news from Boston and beyond, as well as links to live video. This seems to be the perfect model of how to use twitter. 7News competitor @WBZ’s bio reads “No RSS – just real updates from real people at WBZ.” This is a concept I wish more Albany news stations would implement on their twitter accounts 'real people' no RSS.

WTEN, WNYT, WRGB, WXXA and YNN all rely too much on the dreaded twitter feed. Twitter is supposed to be about making connections and conversation. How can a follower do that with a feed? Having said that, I do not want to give the impression that no ‘real people’ ever tweet from the five Albany news stations' twitter accounts, they do. However, it seems there could be more consistency in how the twitter accounts are updated.

In a B&C article, YNN news director Gary Holems says, to him, twitter is like a wire service. Meaning, followers of news accounts want the most up to the minute news. There needs to be more breaking news, and followers should be able to depend on twitter accounts for up to the minute information. For example, Tuesday afternoon at one o’clock in the afternoon while there was a scheduled press conference in Amsterdam, I kept an eye on twitter to see who tweeted what. There were continuous updates from @cbs6albany an update from @fox23news and an update at the end of the press conference from @wten. I was expecting many more twitter updates about that press conference. Another example, captured by Rob Madeo on his Times Union blog involves how a breaking news story was –or was not– covered, on twitter, in May.

Overall, the main News10 twitter account seems to have the most updates from ‘real people,’ but that is not to say they have the best social media coverage. By my count, YNN has the most individual accounts; 26 reporters, meteorologists, and kid critics tweeting and continuously updating their followers. One the Facebook side, most of CBS6 Albany’s anchors have pages (in addition to the station's main account) where viewers get to interact with Liz, Jerry, Teresa, Greg and Marci. Which is why it’s so hard to answer the question “Who does the best social media?”

So what can be done to improve local news stations’ twitter accounts? Here are some of my thoughts:

• Twitter must be a requirement for everyone in newsrooms. Reporters/anchors, meteorologists, photographers, producers and assignment editors should use twitter to update followers on breaking news, post links to interesting stories and links to live video and promote what’s coming up on the evening news. WHDH Boston even uses twitvid to tweet a promo for their evening newscasts. Something that I think is a great idea, and should be adopted by local news stations.

• Create more accounts and use the retweet feature. While NewsChannel 13 has their own twitter account for weather, the others do not. So instead of tweeting about weather from the main account, a separate account should be set up for the weather department, assignment desk an individual reporters. When individual twitter accounts exist the main account should retweet important updates from the individual accounts.

• And finally, get rid of twitterfeed, or have a separate account for the feed. Local blog, All over Albany, has a twitter account just for a feed of their site and another account for ‘real people’ tweets. That’s not to say a twitter account should have no news articles, but simply barfing up everything from a website to twitter makes it cumbersome to uncover the important tweets/breaking news as apposed to other news stories.

Twitter shouldn’t seem like an extra, but an extension of how the story is told.