Being on Facebook or Twitter is a good start, Denise Graveline writes, but if you're not careful, you might watch your words float away on the wind: "That's because you haven't taken the time to learn the art of timing your posts to social media sites. ... Often, the underlying reason is that no one behind your feed has researched timing — that is, the times of day and days of the week that yield the best levels of engagement for your business, brand or organization."
Social media
Steve Buttry has posted a Twitter tutorial for absolute beginners, complete with screenshots. It covers, among other things, opening a Twitter account, setting up your account preferences, composing your first "tweets," finding people to follow, and managing your incoming tweets: "One of the most important things to do is monitor your “mentions,” which will be tweets where someone uses your @username, either replying to you, retweeting you or talking about you."
From the Pew Research Center comes an update on the rising influence of social media on news consumption habits, both print and TV: "Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form." Commentary from Poynter, Higher Ed Marketing, and Nieman Lab.
If branding is a key to success in journalism now, then how can you use Twitter to achieve that? Here's one new way the giant microblogging service is rolling out, according to the 10,000 Words site. In short, you'll soon be able to add a Facebook-style cover photo that will appear on the web and many smartphone and tablet apps. See some samples here. More from Twitter's announcement and AllTwitter.
"Social media is a ‘time suck,’ like lots of useful journalism tools," Steve Buttry writes as he discusses contrasting views from two current journalism conferences. At the Associated Press Managing Editors meeting, one top AP editor called social media a "time suck," Buttry writes. But at the Online News Association's conference, panelists outlined best social media practices for journalists. More tips from Tim Nekritz.
Bora Zivkovic is Scientific American's blog editor and a blogger himself. In this SciAm post, he talks about how blogging has changed and where it is going: "Many people used blogging software to do very brief updates back when that was the only game in town. Today, quick updates, links etc. are done mainly on social media and many bloggers use the traditional blogging software only for longer, more thorough, one could even say more “professional” writing."
Here's the test: Can you fail? If you're "publishing" on a social media or blog site, you can't fail financially, so you're not a publisher, Kent Anderson writes on the Scholarly Kitchen: "When we tweet, blog, or update, we are not publishers. We are authors. Twitter, WordPress, or Facebook are the publishers. They just accept nearly everything we submit, so it feels like we’re publishers. But each company has sheltered us as authors from the risks of their ventures."
And should you care? A bad score on the social media influence site may have cost Sam Fiorella a marketing job, Seth Stevenson writes in Wired magazine, but Erik Kain at Forbes says Klout is inaccurate, obscure, and redundant. Which makes Klout sounds like a subject ripe for parody: "This is about as scientific as Klout’s own measurements — which is to say, it’s pretty much a crapshoot."
Not so, says Denise Graveline on her "don't get caught" blog. Graveline lists some Pinterest pages that aim at a broader audience — from baseball enthusiasts to office furniture shoppers — then reviews some tools to help beginning users improve their Pinterest presence. Pinterest is growing and now trails "only Twitter and Facebook in terms of traffic," Graveline writes. "That, in turn, makes it a powerful driver of traffic to your blog, social presence or website."
Probably not as well as these collected by Columbia University's Sree Sreenivasan. Sreenivasan's tips, posted here, stress the basics: Your full name, employer or major freelance clients, email address, phone number. Those on his "best" list add more: "Editor-in-chief of the world's best food site," "I love NYC, tech & funk," and "A tech, news, rollerblading, nature, urban, art, Apple, apples, web and coffee-obsessed multimedia journalist."