Now, Facebook has added this tool to its own Insights for page admins, and today I saw it in action for the first time.
Clicking on “View 1 share” brings this pop-up box:
Facebook isn’t showing me anything I could not find through a regular search on Facebook or another website. Lisa Isler-Karney’s post is public, just like a blog post or a tweet, because of the Facebook privacy that setting she chose. But it’s a nice perk for a Facebook page admin to see the sharing activity right from our own Wall.
While we continue to await the ability to create brand pages on Google Plus, teases across our website inviting local Palm Beach Post readers to add me to their circles, as the paper’s social media editor, remain active.
Still, only a trickle of readers are taking the bait so far: Just 54 locals have added me to their Google+ circles, up only 4 people in the past month. We may see more interaction when official brand pages are enabled.
If G+ is able to eventually rival Facebook’s spot as a mainstream social network, it has the potential to offer better search capabilities and better analytics. Not to mention its innovative features like intimate video-chat Hangouts.
But that still remains a big “if,” despite its rapid growth. Continue reading →
On a recent Thursday I was catching up on our messages from The Post’s Twitter followers.
Many of the direct messages we receive are responses to our auto-follow note that asks new followers whether they are locals.
That morning, I noticed an email from a new @pbpost Twitter follower that was a little unusual.
The stereotypical image of a Twitter user is a young person tapping out text-like updates from a cellphone. But here was Palm Beach Post reader Richard Philpott of Boynton Beach – who tweets about politics and history – breaking the mold.
I decided to highlight Richard as our Reader of the Week for that week, and I posted his message to our Facebook page along with this note:
Anyone else out there been reading The Post for 40 years? Richard Philpott of Boynton Beach, a longtime Palm Beach Post reader, is now also keeping up with our news via Twitter on @pbpost. He’s this week’s Reader of the Week to thank him for his loyalty!
The responses, though they included the usual jokes and grousing, were pretty encouraging as several other longtime loyal readers came out of the woodwork: Continue reading →
The latest social network on the block, Google Plus, is still in “field trial” with limited users, including a few of us on The Palm Beach Post’s web team and elsewhere in the newsroom who are trying it out.
However, early response is positive. There are already 10 million users, and they’re sharing 1 billion items a day, according to Google CEO Larry Page.
At first glance, Google+ seems to similar to Facebook, especially in the layout and function of its news feed, notifications and posts. Users “+1” posts instead of liking them.
One key perk, though, is how easy G+ makes it to segregate posts among different audiences. For instance, if I want to post something about my vacation, I can easily choose to share that post only with my Friends circle on G+. If I want to put on my journalist hat and share my comments on the latest Pew survey, I can share that post either publicly or with just my Journalism circle.
As The New York Times’ review of G+ points out: “You share each item with only the people who deserve to know. And simultaneously, you spare the masses from seeing news of no interest to them; why should the whole world be in on your discussion of this Friday’s bowling outing?”
Facebook offers this functionality, but doesn’t make it nearly as easy. And Twitter doesn’t really do offer at all, sticking mostly to the tweets-are-public-to-the-world model that got Anthony Weiner in so much trouble. Continue reading →
Today, Susan upped her social-media rockstar status even more during her first time using CoveritLive, instead of Twitter, to live-blog a high-profile sentencing hearing.
I’ve written before about why I prefer CoveritLive to Twitter for live-blogging an event. Those reasons are listed here, and it doesn’t mean Twitter is bad, just more useful for other purposes.
As defendant Dalia Dippolito, the South Florida woman who tried to have her husband killed, was waiting anxiously for the judge’s hammer to come down, so were thousands of Palm Beach Post readers logged on to Susan’s live chat.
This is too good not to share: New York Times writers Nick Kristof and Brian Stelter recently sought feedback from their readers about what they like to see journalists do on social media.
NYT social media editor Liz Heron tracked the readers’ responses and collected some of the most interesting:
Some media organizations use social media to give their audience a peek behind the scenes of the news-gathering process.
For example, using Instagram, a popular photo-sharing app that adds arty filters to iPhone-snapped images, ABC World News shared a glimpse of Diane Sawyer in the cockpit of the “Nightwatch” aircraft during her journey to Afghanistan.
ABC World News
Closer to home, WPTV-Channel 5 in West Palm Beach has a Facebook photo gallery called “Behind the scenes” that lets viewers in on sights they may not normally see during the nightly newscast, like green-screen setups, reporters working at their desks, even a baby deer chewing on a cameraman’s tripod. Continue reading →
Created with the philosophy that social media are more than just tools such as Twitter and Facebook, our website is launching a new section called Community Post, which focuses on our readers and their neighborhoods and allows people to share and comment on local issues.
I’ve been building Community Post behind the scenes for a few weeks, inspired by several different threads of thoughts I’ve had for a while.
Palm Beach Post reporters and editors, like those in any newsroom, receive hundreds of emails every week from readers. Many of the emails are personal grievances or spam, but many others are valid and interesting story ideas and other nuggets of information. And just because we may not always have the space we want in print to cover everything, that doesn’t mean feedback from readers has to go into a black hole.
I created Community Post as a way to capitalize on user-generated content and give readers a voice and all of those other clichés. 🙂 Community Post isn’t a new idea, it’s just my version of it for The Palm Beach Post.
During Cox Media Group President Doug Franklin’s visit today to The Palm Beach Post, among the focus areas he mentioned for strengthening the company’s digital future was social media.
Franklin said Cox properties should experiment with social media and not be afraid to try new things.
As an example, Franklin praised traffic reporter Jenni Hogan from Cox station KIRO-TV in Seattle. Hogan (@jennihogan) is thought to have the most Twitter followers in local TV news, with 30,000+ and counting.
Franklin said Hogan – a self-described fashionista who favors the color purple – started building her Twitter fan base in part by posting photos of her outfits and inviting followers to comment on them.
Hogan recently leveraged her huge following by asking people to donate items for underprivileged babies. She then hosted a “mobile tweetup” and joined a team that drove around for several hours one day to collect the donations.
Does this mean every media organization should copy this formula? Should newspaper reporters post photos of their outfits? Should teams of web producers rove the neighborhood picking up diapers? Continue reading →
Could this be better than TweetDeck for posting? I know I’m late to this party, but I recently started using Chrome and discovered the browser’s bit.ly extension.
It makes tweeting a bit.ly-shortened link even faster and easier than TweetDeck. Basically, when I’m on a URL I want to tweet, all I have to do is click the little bit.ly fish icon on the upper right and I get a pop-up window with:
the URL shortened via my bit.ly account of choice
the tweet filled out with the story’s headline, which I can edit
and then tweet right from my browser.
This short video shows you how:
Real-time social media collaboration
As an experiment, I rounded up a team across different departments last month at The Palm Beach Post to use real-time social media collaboration via group text message for coverage of SunFest, West Palm Beach’s big annual music and arts festival.
To keep our new @SunFestPulse Twitter account hopping throughout the five-day festival, eight of us used the group-chat app Beluga on our cellphones to pitch in and post more than 200 updates, retweets and interactions with festival-goers.
With the dedicated Twitter account, we picked up 175 followers along the way, had some nice back-and-forth with people and helped bring more awareness to our entertainment site, pbpulse.com.
I’m glad we did this test run in a way we could plan and control, because the knowledge and practice we picked up along the way will undoubtedly help when we want to consider using this tool in the future for a breaking-news event.
Find tweeps to follow
I often say you don’t have to tweet in order to get something out of Twitter; the microblogging service is very useful as a news feed for whatever topics interest you, professionally or personally. Now, Twitter has made it easier to find content relevant to you on its new (ish) Who to Follow page.
Web Up the Newsroom 