Is your station on Twitter yet? And by “on Twitter,” I don’t mean either “you have an account reserved,” or “we feed our news headlines into it automatically.”
Both of those options are a fine baby step, but not enough. Several months ago, we dumped the TwitterFeed from our RSS and went with a human-managed solution. Since that time we’ve seen follower growth skyrocket — and we’re seeing a direct impact on site traffic.
- Assign someone to manage the feed. Send between ten and 20 updates per day – and try to put at little coverage in the evenings and weekends
- Have a personality. All the users on Twitter are being personal and somewhat real. It’s a dialog. Don’t be “just the facts ma’am.” Instead try and engage by being human. Make it obvious that there’s someone behind the tweets.
- Identify yourself. Don’t be just an anonymous “KZZZ” – let people know who you are. I put my name in our bio line. If you have a team of folks, put them all there. Social media is about being social… and the last time I was at a party I wasn’t chatting up the TV set.
- Retweet. A lot. Some of our best Twitter stream info comes from other sources. If you don’t know the retweet concept yet – it’s simple. You start with “RT” then “@username” and repost that user’s original message. It’s OK to make small edits (for instance to shorten it to fit under 140 characters) – just don’t change the meaning. Guidelines for retweeting are simple — repost anything your audience will find interesting, but is also authoritative. I will RT a “non official” source if it makes sense. For instance, if a user says “we just got a major wind gust in SE Boise,” I may repost that. I’ll also repost an average user’s tweet if it has a link to a valid news source.
- Link! The majority of the tweets you send out should link somewhere. I try not to only send links to our site — but anywhere. Whether it’s your competition, a news source out of state or a great website – include a link. Always make sure the link starts with http:// so Twitter.com and Twitter API clients will hyperlink your URL. You can also use a URL shortener, which leads me to…
- Sign up for tr.im. This service allows you to shorten URLs just like tinyurl, snipr, is.gd or others — but also gives you statistical tracking. That’s right — your Omniture reports might show only a few clicks from Twitter.com — but since a TON of Twitter users get their feeds on Tweetdeck, Tweetie, via text or other methods, those stat programs don’t show the true picture. When I started using tr.im, my eyes were opened to how much traffic our tweets were generating. It was more than 30 times what Omniture illustrated.
- Solicit for news. If we have a little morsel of a story, I’ll often toss it out there and see if anyone has more. My favorite example happened earlier this month. A major Idaho resort shut down operations, and we had heard there were some weddings left in the lurch. I sent out a tweet asking if anyone knew of a bride affected – and got a note back within minutes. It led to this great story the next day. This is probably just one of a dozen examples of the power of the crowd.
- Start multiple feeds. My colleague Frank Mungeam at kgw.com has done a great job of getting reporters on the bandwagon. He’s created a feed page on his site that shows them all. We’ve got feeds for sports, weather, our morning anchor, news director and our classifieds site. Our “main” account spreads it all around by retweeting some of the notes from the “sub” accounts.
- Engage. Respond to users who ask questions – and also try to help people who are critical. Usually when we try to work with a user on an issue, they seem to come away being happier. Twitter is partially about brand management, so trying to improve your image can be helpful.
- Want to grow? Follow! We don’t want Twitter to just be a one-way bullhorn from on high. We try to follow everyone who follows us. I also actively seek out followers in our area by following them. The will usually return the favor by following you back. The more people who read your tweets, the more likely they are to click on one or two.
- Keep it simple. Don’t overload with too many details. You only have 140 characters, so this is somewhat obvious – but you want to move people to your site. At the same time, don’t be vague and teasy. So…
- Don’t be teasy. I will sometimes promote a newscast, primetime program or upcoming feature — but it’s never the overbaked “What’s in your water? It may KILL you! Find out tonight on KZZZ at 11!” If you build trust, you can sometimes promote to something in the future — but be careful.
- Create a feed page on your site. We have posted our Twitter feed on our site with a link – labeling it the “live news feed, powered by Twitter.” On the page you’ll find our most recent tweets, as well as a basic explainer, and a list of our other accounts (ala KGW, above).
- Download Tweetdeck. This software program allows you to manage the flow better. Since we follow nearly 2,000 people – wading through it all can be hard. With Tweetdeck, you can create columns with different information. I’ve divided ours into three: the “live feed” with all tweets, a “search” for all tweets containing “KTVB,” and a “good stuff” column with about 100 tweeps whose tweets I value. This includes other media, some PR pros, other newsroom members and general community members. Tweetdeck allows you to tweet directly from the application.
- Create a “live” account. I’ve created a “live tweeting” account for times when you want to live tweet an event. When the vice president visited town in February, I live-tweeted some of the happenings on our main account.. but it got to be a bit overwhelming for some users. So I’ve created another account that we can live tweet from. I’ve created a special “live coverage” page that I can link to from our website — which will make it easy to cover a big event, and let folks opt in or out of the fun. Make sure to tweet on your main account letting people know of the other fun
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