7 New Journalists Social Media Guides

With these hints, your performance in the social web will be optimized for your audience.

This diagram is a result of a social media project at FH Wien. We asked ourselves the question, in what way a journalist can adjust his oder her output to various social media platforms and the respective audience.

Our diagram shows three areas you should think of:

Journalist = How to present yourself: be credible. Present yourself as you would do in reality. To create a good fake image is hard and mostly not successful.

Media = Which platforms you would like tu use (e.g. facebook, twitter, ..) Which tools do you want to embed (rankings, videos, etc.) and which platform suits best according this demands.

Be aware to act according to your platform, e.g.: on Twitter you can repeat posts more often, because users forget fast. Thats different if you do a blog.

Audience = Think about your target group: which devices are they using, at which daytime do they need the information,

There are a lot of different ways to spread content these days… We tried to compile a guidline on how to start your personal social media strategy.

There are two ways to use social media as a journalist: 

a) for investigation
b) for publishing

We focused on the latter one. We asked ourselves four questions.

We are master students of a “Journalism and New Media” course in Vienna.
These are our thoughts on various essential criteria for journalists working with social media for research, networking and publishing purposes. This blog is to be understood as a workbook.

There is no media without social media. The question is not if you use it, but how you do it. Professional journalistic work requires some basic rules and gudelines for research and realization. In the diagramm below we offer you some basic information for your work on twitter and facebook, compared to daylife communication.

How social media journalists can interact with their audience.

We distinguish between two processes: producing (green arrows) and commenting (blue arrows). As producing originate content requires more time and effort than commenting on others work, we suggest that a social media journalist can more easily (and so more often) republish content he considers to be important for his audience than publish own material. This is indicated by the term “frequency” in the diagram.