Finding New Stories Using Social Media

 As a journalist working in the dgitial world to journy to find the right story takes place at the tips of your fingers.

As a print journalist you are often on the go, hunting for the next hot tip or hauling your laptop from location to location hoping to track down your sources, type up your story and submit it- all before your deadline. As a journalist working in the digital world, the process is more or less the same but the journey all takes place at the tips of your fingers.

No matter the type of publication you are writing for, whether it be a print newspaper or an online news website, you can’t go too far without doing one very important thing; finding your story.

In the age of social media sites journalists are able to tailor their journey to the deadline by finding out the hottest current stories, observing who these events effect the most and gain a reaction all in the same place.

As a journalist wanting to use social media tools to find a new story it would be beneficial to first find out what is trending on the net.

The same way search engines like Google keep track of their most heavily searched for topics, social media sites can like Facebook, tumblr and twitter allow visitors to see what topics and phrases are currently most popular.

The following is a description of the term trending topics from ConstantContact.com’s Social Media Glossary. 

Trending Topics

Along the right side of the main web interface, Twitter lists 10 topics that are "hot" on Twitter at the given moment based on certain algorithms. You can see trending topics for all of Twitter or for certain geographic areas. Beware: trending topics are sometimes gamed by people trying to promote pop culture references that aren't truly trending topics. And some businesses now pay for their product to be a trending topic (Disney was one of the first, for Toy Story 3.)

The following YouTube video shows how to use Twitter's trending topics and shows how to use them to find whats current and whats worth writing about. 

Similar to Twitter’s trending topics, Facebook has its trending topics. These topics appear in your Facebook news feed. The popularity and buzz around the topic determines its placement on the feed. This can be valuable as Facebook allows you to see a more expansive reaction to each topic. What is it about? Are there links already being posted to realted videos or pictures. What are people saying about it? Who seems interested by it? Young people? Men? Women? Teens? This helps when writing for a particular audience. If your target audience seems to be posting responses to the topic and using tools like sharing, this may be the story for you.  

Another way to find out what topics are in the now and worth writing about is to use trending tags or hashtags. Below is a description of tags from ConstantContact.com’s Social Media Glossary.

          

         Hashtag

Words preceded by a # sign (i.e., #ctctsocial) can be used to tie various tweets together and relate them to a topic, be it a conference, TV show, sporting event, or any happening or trend of your choosing. Twitter automatically links all hashtags so users can search for other tweets using the same tag.

Once your find a tag related to your topic it can be used on twitter, tumblr or other media management websites like HootSuite to find other posts, tweets, comments which share the tag and are likely to share the topic. The following YouTube video explains the use of tags and hashtags (#) as filters.

Once your topic is chosen you can continue to use these sites to find sources and gain further information related to your story.