@ReverendKong
Twitter. In only a few short years it has gone from being an online novelty to a necessary tool for celebrities, musicians and most importantly journalists to use in order to promote their work and interact with their fans. After analyzing the Twitter profiles of three journalists, I discovered some interesting trends that reflect both social status and work production.
The first Twitter profile I monitored was that of freelance pop culture journalist Chuck Klosterman. Currently, Klosterman has 46,129 followers and is following a mere 78 people. Even with an incredibly low re-follow ratio, Klosterman is constantly retweeting his followers and replying to their tweets. He's not a heavy tweeter, only posting about 1.5 times a day but he uses his tweets effectively. Along with retweeting his followers, Klosterman does post links to his work as well as that of others but his main use of Twitter seems to be for posting witty musings that come about during his daily life. This fits his style perfectly as there is an endless supply of pop culture for him to riff on.
Next under the microscope was Craig Kanalley, the Traffic and Trends editor for the Huffington Post. This man is a Twitter fiend. Tweeting nearly 30 times a day, he was by far the busiest tweeter of the three journalists. Sadly this did not translate to him being the most followed; in fact, he was the least followed with only 4,357 followers. I'm not intending to bash him for having 4,000 followers (that's 3,990 more followers than I have) just pointing out that it is considerably lower than the other two journalists. With over 30 tweets a day, Kanalley's posts cover a near endless supply of topics. He's very gracious about retweeting his followers and appears to reply to most questions that they have. He also posts links to a wide variety of articles from the Huffington Post. Very little of what he posts is directly about him or his personal life.
I've saved the heaviest hitter for those of you who've managed to stick with me this far. She's the Queen of questionnaires, a heavyweight of shooting straight, a world class interviewer and generally recognized as having the best legs in the industry. I'm talking about none other than America's journalistic sweetheart, Katie Couric. Weighing in with a whopping 94,709 followers, Couric is a Twitter goddess. She's such a fan of the medium that she hosts a weekly segment for CBS.com titled @katiecouric. Couric tweets roughly 8-10 times a day depending on what random excursion CBS has her on at the time. It should come as no surprise that she doesn't spend as much time responding to followers, but every now and again she will answer a question. One key difference I noticed is that she's a huge fan of posting pictures of where she is and what she's doing as she does it. Her tweets run the gamut from personal to professional, with links to her new interviews, CBS content and occasionally pieces of her private life.
From what I've seen, all three journalists use Twitter in slightly different ways to achieve the same means. Each one has catered their Twitter to optimize enjoyment from their followers while successfully marketing themselves and their work. How you use your Twitter feed is up to you and, barring some extremes, there's really no wrong way to go about tweeting. Do what feels natural and be sure to take your followers' comments/suggestions to heart.
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