Twitter is also a powerful tool for journalists because it encompasses all the benefits of social networking including instant delivery, branding opportunities, and advanced marketing prospects. According to CNN, during the attacks in Mumbai in 2008, approximately 80 “tweets” were being sent via sms every five seconds, providing instant update before the TV broadcasting and eyewitness information about the attacks. During President Obama’s inauguration, Twitter quadrupled its usual traffic per second and increased the number of tweets in a typical minute by four times.
As of March 2008, Twitter is estimated to total 1.5 million users with nearly 4 million Twitters following each other and exchanging 3 millions messages per day. No surprises then that news organizations use Twitter to connect with their audience, employ their sources and build their personal brands. From the organizational perspective, Twitter is an emerging media outlet with enhanced marketing segments where organizations may develop new brands and extend their product base.
So what can Twitter do for a good journalist?
First of all, it is a matter of personal branding. By establishing a personal account that is approachable and open to communication, a journalist can develop social relationships and promote his work. As the number of Twitter users increases, so does the potential exposure to audience.
By gaining exposure, the journalist gets also feedback on his work. Feedback is very valuable because it sets the right direction and offers an alternative perspective on how the account should be like and what postings it should include so as to attract the readers.
Similar to comments and feedback is the chance to hire people who can be freelancers for the account and take care of the design, programming or even marketing. In that way, the journalist will spend time only in writing, while the account will be attractive and functional.
Twitter can be used for finding prospect audience among people who share common interests. By performing a Twitter Search with specific keywords, a journalist can come up with users who can then be followers of his account or he can follow theirs.
Business Management is another important feature of Twitter. It can be used as a company intranet connecting employees when they work on group projects. This facilitates time management as the group is tuned and keeps a detailed record of what they do daily.
Twitter drives direct traffic to an account by tweeting a posting through the contact list. Therefore, if a journalist has a big list of followers, he can ask them to tweet his posting and this will spread quicker and further as other Twitter users pick it up.
Well established news organizations such as CNN and New York Times are using Twitter promptly and proficiently, while Reuters is using Twitter to watch how trends move and finds it works. Indeed, the news industry has jumped in and engaged in Twitter with a hybrid approach.
In return, Twitter provides journalists with enhanced news applications that grant the audience with breaking news. Providing live coverage and real-time commentary expands discussions as long as other Twitter users continue spreading the message. Through the application programming interface (API), journalists can automatically type keywords of interest on their cell phone and post it on Twitter’s interface. With API, news organizations can monitor what is being posted with key words of interest as well as collect information on Twitter members and follow patterns. To get the full benefit of API, journalists use the TwitterFeed for breaking news, blogs, alerts, and political postings.
Serving the need of any journalist to continually come up with new and interesting topics, Twitter offers the opportunity to search, read and select among thousands of articles and newspapers to get ideas for stories. Inspirational ideas need to be shared for generating new ideas. Twitter is a valuable assistant in a journalist’s effort to keep on producing insightful articles that can make a difference.
On the other hand, Twitter faces also a small challenge that relates to its extremely low barriers of entry. Anyone can join and anyone can use its features without any control. Adapting this in the broader context of social media, experienced editors consider it is not a problem because social media can actually solve journalism’s trust and credibility problem. In the future, social networking tools will assist traditional media outlets to track a person’s location. In fact, this will facilitate social networking even more considering that, today many users are reluctant to open accounts on social websites in the fear of being harassed by other members. In the B2B context, news organizations will be able to track down journalists that do not respect their profession and report biased or offending work. As a result, not only journalism will be more credible, but the increase in social media users will result in increased profitability for the news industry.
In effect, Twitter is a relationship building tool. Journalists can extract benefits from users who relate to their profession as long as they network dynamically and effectively.
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