How-To Use Social Media as a Journalist

by: Jackie Griffith

Journalist using social media tools as a source of information is increasing. According to marketingrelevance.com, "nine out of 10  journalist have used social media to investigate an issue." Twitter and Facebook are two social media sites that a journalist could use in writing.

As a journalist, you can use social media to promote your story

• Get an article posted online: personal blog, published on news site, etc.
• Promote story via Twitter and Facebook, these sites you have followers that will see your post. In your post put the headline or attention capturing statement and link it back to your article.
• People should be interested in what you post, make it something that will cause them to wonder and click the link.

As a journalist, you want to intrigue your audience and get them interested/involved

• Question your audience. Get responses from your followers and respond back.
• Show your voice, let your followers see a person behind the story. 
• Use social media to report live to your audience, keep giving live updates for ongoing stories. 

This news station, KXMC-TV in Minot, North Dakota, used Facebook to give live coverage and get viewers involved. Viewers added comments as the station posted updates, photos, and streamed live video via Ustream on their Facebook. 

As a journalist, you can find stories and sources via social media

• Twitter allows you to track keywords and tags, use these to your advantage.  
• Follow the trending topics for story ideas, find out what is hot right now and report it.
• Following news sources allows you to receive breaking news as soon as it happens. Use this to get a story and then follow up with research and keeping updated. 
• Refine your searching to keyword search in a specific location, find sources in your area for face-to-face interviews. 
• You can use social media to gather and save ideas. If you keep updates via twitter, you can create a story in the end. Go back through your tweets and put them together like this New York Times reporter, Brian Stelter. 

As a journalist, don't always believe what you read via social media

• You should always fact check with reliable news sources via social media, check out their Twitter feeds for updates on trending topics. Do not post something you're unsure of just because you can delete a post on Facebook or Twitter doesn't mean you should, gain your audiences trust and build up your credibility. 
• When you see something false trending on Facebook or Twitter, create a post to alert your followers so they will come back when they are in doubt the next time.