Tweet tweet
Started from the bottom
Now we're here
After analyzing the previous strategy and researching our own, we decided to focus on a few specific areas:
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Determining an audience
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More interaction with followers, RTs and @replies
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Creating a more casual, conversational tone
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Tweeting at influencers
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Asking guests to tweet or RT the shows on which they appear
Audience analysis
In order to better target our tweets, we had to figure out who we were tweeting for. Twitter analytics offered an extremely useful window into the lives and likes of our followers. According to the data we gathered, our Twitter audience is:
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Mostly male (60 percent)
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A politics and current events guru
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Interested in news and a close follower of other world news sites
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A book-reader and technology-enthusiast
After anecdotal analysis of our audience, we found that lots of our followers are college students or had worked for Global Journalist in the past. We put our efforts into trying to expand that audience past those who have a direct connection to the newsroom and its operations.
Adding graphics and photos
Increasing engagement
Our entire strategy was based on getting others involved in Global Journalist's content and developing relationships. These are a few of the ways we worked on increasing engagement.
More RTs and replies
Casual tone
Interactions with influencers
Engagement can be as much as 200 percent higher for tweets with photos, according to Mediabistro. So we started creating images, from photo cards to infographics.
In order to make this image-creation fast, we created templates for each kind of file that live on the server. They are optimized to fit the stream of the timeline, so that when a user scrolls through their Twitter feed, they don't have to click to see the entire image or the rest of the text. These templates included photo cards with quotes, photo cards without quotes and infographics.
Especially during Missouri Honor Medals, when we tweeted several photos in a row, these tweets consistently got more RTs and favorites.
Leigh Cowart is an example of one of Global Journalist's many influencers. Cowart appeared on two of Global's shows on Ebola this semester, and each time tweeted out a link to the show, which reached her personal audience and sent an average of 10 unique visitors to Global Journalist. In order to keep people like Cowart engaged, we tweeted at them and thanked them personally for their time on Global.
One of the worst Twitter strategies for a newsroom is to just tweet into the air. So, in order to stay involved, we made sure to check our own newsfeed -- what are other people saying? What are they interested in? How can we help promote others' content in the hopes that they help promote ours? We used retweets, replies and favorites to stay engaged. Also, we incorporated popular hashtags and photos when possible.
Adjusting our tone to fit our mostly college-based audience was crucial to more Twitter success. It's often difficult with hard news topics to make them sound accessible, so we made our headlines more conversational when tweeting out links.
Conclusions and results
We made a lot of progress this semester, but Global's Twitter still has a long way to go if the newsroom wants to increase their follower base and audience.
