Jane Friedman discusses how to gauge results from your social media efforts. Google Analytics tracks how many visitors come to your website from social media platforms, and many platforms have their own analytics. But she adds: "If you find out that social media visitors seem to be a small percentage of your overall website traffic, or the lowest quality visitor, don’t automatically assume that social media doesn’t have any effect on your overall marketing or platform."
Social media
How fast can you compose a blog post? Denise Graveline writes that the secret to speedy blogging is to write only when you're ready: "I work with many clients who spend all their time on the writing, whether that's thinking about the post, staring at the blog interface, or rewriting again and again. You might be sitting down 'to write,' but quickly get distracted by the need to find photos, copyright info, a link you remember but can't find right away."
Jane Friedman discusses how authors can promote their work on social media, and how to use tools like Google Analytics to gauge the results of their efforts: "How extensive should you really get — and is it possible that 'less is more?' I interpret this question to mean: When is enough enough? And how do I make any effort worth my time? Answering this question requires stepping back — waaaay back — and looking at how and why authors use social media in the first place."
There once was a time, children, when you consumed news in a few well-organized ways — a daily newspaper, a nightly news broadcast, an hourly radio update. Now, the flow is constant and you have to organize it yourself, Jihii Jolly writes: "In the same way that financial literacy requires knowing how money works and the most effective methods for managing it, news literacy requires familiarity with how journalism is made and with the most effective ways to consume it."
Popular Science shut down comments last year, and now Pacific Standard's Nicholas Jackson explains why his publication has done the same: Comments "don’t belong at the end of or alongside posts, as if they’re always some extension of or relevant to the original. They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit." Also, building a better moderator, and Twitter changes its tune thanks to Zelda Williams.
NPR and other organizations are warning journalists that their retweets will be seen as endorsements. Jack Shafer says the real issue is control: "The advent of a new communications technology like Twitter plays hell with the editorial guidelines at news organizations because it gives independent megaphones to reporters who ordinarily couldn’t be heard unless editors stamped their approval on their copy and sent it to the wire, the printer, or pushed it over the air."
More than eight years after Twitter began, the editor of the New York Times has not yet filed his first tweet, AJR intern Mary Clare Fischer writes in an update on print journalism's slow adoption: "Newspapers across the country are paying more attention to how to motivate staff members to post articles to social media as a means to drive site traffic, especially amid print circulation declines and the dwindling relevance of the front page (and even the homepage)."
Dueling views on the social-media giant's future. Adrienne Lafrance and Robinson Meyer write in Atlantic that "the platform's place in Internet culture is changing in a way that feels irreversible." And John McDuling on Quartz says Twitter's slowing growth is a concern on Wall Street. But on Slate, Will Oremus predicts it will thrive by "turning its home page into a real-time news platform accessible to anyone."
It's not the social media site that gets the most attention, but Kevan Lee writes that LinkedIn may trump the others in one respect: "Twitter and Facebook may reign when it comes to social sharing of stories, blog posts, and visual media, but when it comes to direct traffic to your main site, LinkedIn is far and away the No. 1 social referral source." Lee's post includes tips for making the most of your LinkedIn presence, and for monitoring your "engagement percentage."
In Slate, Amanda Hess recounts the story of Christine Fox, whose tweets about rape-victim blaming were republished by Buzzfeed. The problem? Twitter, Hess writes, gives reporters "a direct line to random acts of advocacy and casual expressions of bigotry. The new, virtual man on the street doesn't even need to be aware of a reporter's existence in order to turn up on a highly trafficked news source with name, photo, and social media contact information embedded."