ONA Issues

socialmediadesk:

I’m not sure if I’ve ever written this anywhere but I know I’ve said it many times to many different people over the years:

Headline plus link is not the best way to share your story.

We’re guilty of doing this, especially on the main @NPR Twitter account, however, this isn’t a model I’d recommend following.

On social platforms, we emphasize the importance of being human. Tweeting a headline (and only a headline) is lazy and looks automated. Instead, share what’s interesting. Explain to your followers why they should read your story. Tease out shareable quotes or facts that may resonate with different segments of the audience.

You can’t “catch” everyone with one approach. To really get your story out there to the wider audience these days, you should be sharing it in a number of different ways and multiple times. It’s okay to tweet your story more than once! Look at how the NYT tweeted this story multiple times. (H/T Camila Domonske.)

A word of caution: You should share your stories multiple times, but thoughtfully and with respect for your audience. This means that you should not repeat yourself, nor should you only use a platform as a megaphone. You must tweet other things and engage in other ways, too.

One great thing we can all do is share the work of our peers. Over the years, we’ve all been cultivating our own social audiences. While the main NPR Twitter account has an astounding 4.5 million followers, each of us has a different, unique audience who we engage with more directly. Our smaller, individual audiences don’t mirror the overall NPR audience. Our audiences are more diverse and reach far wider.

Scott Montgomery recently sent a note out to the newsroom to encourage folks to share NPR’s special visual presentation of the rain forest deforestation taking place in Brazil. The idea was to activate the audiences of our reporters and editors on Twitter and have the project reach a larger audience.

Serri Graslie collected a lot of these tweets and it’s really interesting to see the different ways each of you shared the project. See more here.

Brazil

Was this successful? I don’t have the data in front of me to clearly say so or not, but that’s neither here nor there. The heart of the matter is that we worked together to share the important journalism we’re is doing - and each of us had a different way of doing it.

Let’s do more of that.