Facebook
Facebook is no longer as popular as it used to be in terms
of using it to promote a company or product, but that does not mean that it’s
not still useful or worthwhile. The way facebook should be used, in terms of
posts, is similar to that of twitter (see below) however, as there is no
character limit on facebook, the introductory sentence(s) can be longer and a
little more detailed. This, however, does not mean that we should give away the
entire story in the post; we still want to get the reader to click through to
our site to find out more.I’ve noticed a lot of the magazines are starting to create their own facebook pages too, which is great. If you’ve made one but aren’t sure of the best way to use it, please feel free to get hold of me. Ideally all of the different WINOL facebook pages should like each other in the same way that all the WINOL twitter accounts should follow one another.
Everyone on facebook should also both like the WINOL sites and try to promote them to their friends and family as much as they think is appropriate; we don’t want you to annoy your facebook friends or anything, but we do want to get as many people to like our page as possible.
Twitter
It’s great that we now have twitter accounts for each of the
magazines but the way in which they are being used is not always appropriate.
For a start, we need to avoid “over sexing” each tweet; if someone is coming in
as a guest lecturer then say that rather than that they’re “getting down and
dirty” or something like that. You might get away with “teaching us a lesson”
in the right context, but it’s best to avoid anything that could be construed
as an innuendo. We also need to try not to “spam” followers with same-y tweets;
whilst we are trying to push people into reading our articles, we don’t want
them to cotton on to the fact that that’s what we’re doing. However, we also
need to maintain a presence and not only tweet once or twice a fortnight. Also,
we need to stop re-tweeting others as much or doing anything that sounds like
promotion work – we are a news organisation, not a PR company. When you
re-tweet something, not only are you promoting that twitter profile (to an
extent) you are making it more likely that they will be re-tweeted by your
followers than you are. Instead, you should check the information from that
tweet is true and then reword the tweet to suite your angle, images or to
include new information you have learnt. And, when talking about something that
is coming up, it needs to a) not sound like we’re promoting an event (such as a
gig at the railway) unless they’re doing something back for us and b) that it
is definitely happening as there’s nothing worse than promoting something that
never actually happens. Some of the third years set up twitter accounts last
year, such as sports and features, and the log in details need to handed over
to the new people in their roles and to the Social Media Editor so that they
can be properly used and maintained.For the @WINOL account, posts regarding News or feature articles should take the following form:
“Title in quote marks” short line taken from the news story – winol.co.uk/link_direct_to_article
The line from the story often has to be edited to fit the 140-character tweet limit. When counting characters you should try to remember that website links always take up 20 characters, no matter how long or short they actually are. However, ideally, the few introductory words should be written by the reporter (as they understand the story best) and sound similar to the headlines at the beginning of the bulletin as these will tease the twitter user into reading the article in the same way that the headlines tease the viewer into watching the rest of the news. The reporter should also have at least an idea, though ideally a firm list, of twitter accounts to tweet directly to. For example, if you’re doing or have done a gonzo piece about a sport, you should have an idea of some local teams that play it, some of the players involved, some sports facilities or clubs that do this sport and fan groups for it and therefore should be able to find their twitter accounts to try to tweet at to get a re-tweet from them to all their followers who are very likely to have a keen interest in the story.
On top of this, each member of the WINOL should have their own separate, professional account partly to keep people up to date as to how their story’s going but also to preview what will be coming up on WINOL and to help keep the @WINOL twitter feed looking fresh. So, when you’re going to interview someone or have just been dancing with a local squad or anything like that, let us know on twitter including our twitter name “@WINOL.” Ideally, if you could take a photo and tweet that too, that would be even better. All of these accounts should also follow WINOL and all of the magazine and Sports accounts to keep you up to date with what’s happening. Your professional and personal accounts must be kept separate; it is entirely possible that future employers will look at your professional twitter account to see how well you can use modern technology and it wouldn’t reflect well on you if there are a load of drunk tweets and pictures on there. I realise it might be annoying having to rebuild another set of followers, but it would be incredibly unprofessional not to keep personal and professional social media use separate. Ideally, you should also state on your professional twitter that all views are your own and not those of WINOL and include your WINOL role, a link to the website and the WINOL twitter account name (@WINOL) in your professional twitter account biography.
Tumblr
Upload with picture: The first line in the caption should be
the title and in bold. On the next line there should be a line or two to
explain the story in brief. Then click “Set a click-through link” and add the
URL link to the specific article. It is incredibly important to use as many
relevant tags as possible so that it is more likely that people find our posts
in their searches; the tag box is down the side of the page, much like it is on
blogger. If you are using a creative commons photo then you must attribute the
photo to its owner at the bottom of the description. You can use multiple
photos and or .gifs (moving photos and a staple of tumblr) which should make it
stand out more and make it more likely for people to “re-blog” it and share it
with more people.If, however, you do not have a picture or the only picture available is of a poor quality, you will need to upload it as a text post which works in much the same way.
So far we only have a tumblr account for our news, but it would probably be a good idea to make ones for each of the magazines, especially Absolute:ly magazine which is designed to have a lot of pictures and would appeal to a fairly large portion of tumblr users.
Pinterest
Before I go into how we specifically will be using pinterst,
I must stress how important it is for us to only use our own photos on this
site and no images from creative commons.On our pinterest profile, we can create “boards” of our pictures that link directly back to our site. This means we can make a board for viewer pictures, each of the magazines and each individual sport as well as news. However, before we can use this to full effect the quality of images needs to drastically improve. Under each picture there should be a short headline-style description and another link back to the site.
Flickr
The way we are currently using what could be a very
important feather in our cap is appalling; flickr could be a great way of
getting other publications to use our content on there site and therefore make
other people aware of WINOL. However, a large number of our pictures are of
poor quality, not set to creative commons and aren’t necessarily ours to use.Whilst I realise that the new system requires us to upload photos to flickr for use on the site, if it is not our photo, it needs to be set to private. We should also try to stop using screen shots from packages as it looks incredibly unprofessional.
For each upload to flickr, we should try to rename the picture to something similar to a newspaper headline rather than using the file name. Then, in the description, we should try to have a line or two from the article and a link to the article on the site. Underneath, using some sort of separator such as a few asterisks on a line, we should have a description of the photo including what the subject is, who took/owns the photograph and, if the photo is ours, the conditions for use by others.
E-mail
As well as using social media, we also send out a weekly
reminder to staff and students at the university via e-mail. Using the
university e-mail system, you can send the message out to everyone by clicking
“New” then “To…” and searching “Faculty” in the pop up box. Double click on all
relevant search results to add the list to the message recipients then press
“OK.”The e-mail itself should read something along the lines of:
Hello,
As always, we have a great
bulletin for you on winol.co.uk – live at 5pm
today! This weeks stories include:~ -Headline 1- ;
~ -Headline 2- ; and
~ -Headline 3- .
Plus local sports and a whole host of magazines to suite everyone’s taste on our website.
Until the bulletin comes out, you
can check out our twitter feed (twiter.com/WINOL)
and our facebook page (facebook.com/WinchesterNewsOnline)
for more information, as well as the written stories on our website: winol.co.uk
Remmeber, we’re live at 5pm today
at winol.co.uk!
Name Surname
Please Note
As the social media sphere changes, this page will be
updated with new information as to how sites should be used and which ones
WINOL will be (trying) to use.Also, the Social Media Editor should be told the log in details of any and all social media accounts and, for facebook pages, be made an admin so that the Social Media Editor can keep an eye on the use and edit or delete any content that they feel is inappropriate or inaccurate.
