Twitter is not just for celebrities

By Dayra Rodriguez

@dayraduhhh

I recently observed the Twitter profiles of three completely different journalists from different publications and observed their use of social media.

Jeff Houck is a food journalist who works for the Tampa tribune and TBO.com. He states on his “bio” that “I get paid to taste and write. I highly recommend it.” He has 3,354 followers and tweets/updates a few times a day. From his Twitter page he posts new tweets every few hours. However, he replies to his followers and re-tweets more often than posting new tweets. What I did notice was his posts tend to be more personal and quite opinionated.

Howard Troxler is a columnist who writes mainly about topics affecting Florida and the Tampa Bay area for the St. Petersburg Times. He is completely opposite to Housk. This journalist hasn’t updated or tweeted since April 2010. His more recent posts are of his past articles and he doesn’t even post many links to his articles either. There seems to be no sign of anything personal on his profile, strictly about his articles. I also saw no interaction with his few followers.

Jaena Lee Tahnk lives in Boston and is a writer for Mashable, Huff post, daily Candy Kids; she also is a high-tech PR consultant, mother of two . This busy lady keeps her 2,041 followers up to date more than the other two journalists put together. She is a very frequent tweeter; she re-tweets, replies and adds new tweets. All throughout her profile, you can see many links and hash tags everywhere. Her profile seems to be a mixture of personal and business. She’ss post links to up-to-date events but at the end of her tweets she’ll put a little opinion in.

Each journalist has a link to a different site in their biographies located on the top right of their Twitter profile. The links lead to their blog sites, resume and their own sites. On these sites, they provide more professional information and background on it. So from my observation, they are branding themselves using Twitter. All three clearly state that they are journalists and which publications they work for.

These three journalists have completely different approaches of using social media. One was strictly for their articles with no interaction while the other two of the three enjoyed Twitter with their frequent updating and replies.