My college journalism professor, Dr. Jerry Zurek, sent me an email this morning asking about social media. The email went out to a majority of the top journalism students in my class and the class below asking questions, I believe, in the hopes that his current students could be let in on the not-so-secret reasons as to why Twitter and Facebook are so important in the journalism world. This is my response.
Montgomery News has a unique chance as a weekly, local paper to capture the attention of our large community. While national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post must compete with the best on a national scale, Monty has very few competitors when it comes to the weekly spectrum.
Our path to success is obvious. We need to find more readers. How can we do that? Well, we can't just sit around and wait for them to find us anymore. Instead, we need to find them.
Over the past two months, we have taken giant steps toward our goal to find our readers and I believe that much of this has to do with our new Twitter (@MontgomeryMedia) and Facebook (Montgomery Newspapers) pages. It is so easy to go to search.Twitter.com use the "nearby:" feature and find Twitter users in our area. In fact, each night I sit at my computer trying to come up with at least 15 twitter users in our area that we are not following or who are not following us.
We began using Twitter in late May of '09 after I convinced our publisher that this was a free way to advertise our publications. Readership from May to June jumped by 10,000 page views and about 4,000 readers. We are projecting another jump by the end of July and through hyper-texting (linking stories in our text), which we just started this month, I am projecting that we will go beyond that extra 10,000 page views.
So what do we Tweet? It's all about relevance. If a person is killed in an auto accident, we Tweet the location into the headline. If a college is raising tuition we tweet the name of the college and make sure it gets to our college crowd on Facebook. This also means that if we can find a select group of people on Facebook who go to the college, we personally post the article onto their Facebook wall. Show me a national paper that will take the time to do that.
The July 4th weekend was a perfect example of how effective we have become in terms of promotional social networking. Our web hits usually peak on Wednesdays and Thursday when our print publication is delivered to the public. Over the weekends, our hits would normally fall by the hundreds.
However, July 4th weekend changed all of that. We posted videos, photos, and even articles teasing the next week's print publication, to our website. All the while, we were on Twitter and Facebook posting the updated articles, announcing changes to celebration schedules and even announcing where we would be reporting on that day or the next hoping that readership would increase. It did.
We nearly doubled our readership that weekend and I believe it was because readers were told, through Twitter and Facebook, that our site, which up until that point had been mainly changed on a weekly basis, was being updated and people could miss something if they did not check our page.
Today, our weekend readership is reflecting upon our July 4th weekend performance. Readers are checking the website to see if we have reported on events like summer community concerts and local news. They are getting what they want and I strongly believe that this change could not have happened without our new use of social media and the loyalty of our new readers.
Labels: andrew stettler, andy stettler, cabrini college, facebook, Jerry Zurek, journalism, july 4th, montgomery media, montgomery newspapers, multimedia journalism, Twitter
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