5 Twitter Tips for Journalists

Twitter Tips for Journalists

It is very important to realize that Twitter can work for anyone when used in the right way. Whether you are a writer, a designer, a marketer or an ambitious journalist, there is always a specific path for you to follow on Twitter in order to promote your work and meet potential customers.

For today’s post, I will be sharing with you 5 great Twitter tips for journalists.

I will begin by stating the variety of purposes journalists can use Twitter for:

• Monitor activities and discussions of people in your community.
• Connect with people who will provide you with helpful tips and information.
• Connect with colleagues and share ideas with them or get ideas from them.
• Crowd source stories by asking the community for story ideas or information.
• Quickly find people who witnessed or experienced news worthy events.
• Break stories quickly.
• Provide live coverage of news events.
• Drive traffic to your website or blog.
• Report a story by text message using Twitter in disaster situations when you can’t transmit data.
• Improve your writing as you learn to make points directly in just 140 characters.

So how can you, as a journalist, make use of Twitter effectively?

1. Organize and manage your Twitter account by selecting an application to work with throughout the day such as Hootsuite.
2. Find local tweeps through Twitter’s advanced search feature or by using other tools such as TwitterLocal.net, NearbyTweets, Localtweeps or various iPhone apps, such as Twinkle and Tweetie.
3. Follow breaking stories in real time through Twitterfall. Create a custom search to follow topics you specify — and save them for later retrieval. Type in an address into the geolocation panel to see what people are discussing in that area.
4. Find a resource – such as @helpareporter – and follow him/her to be connected to other journalists with more news sources.
5. Report on location using Twitter based software such as Twitcam which is a new service that combines the simplicity of Twitter with the ability to stream live video, thanks to a partnership with Livestream. You could report live from the scene of a speech, a fire, a protest or another breaking news event.

Hope you found these tips valuable!

Looking forward to your comments and feedback in the comment section below :)