In this week's lecture, breakfast radio host Spencer Howson talked about how to use social media to engage with your audience. I thought the subject was absolutely fascinating and Spencer did a fantastic job as lecturer. I wanted to learn more about social media and so I stumbled across this Youtube video (which you may have seen before):
As the video notes, consumers are more likely to trust peer reviews than actual advertisements. With 53% of people recommending products on Twitter, this means businesses are no longer advertising their product; people are. Social media has developed a 'word-of-mouth' approach to business. Producers can no longer rely on traditional marketing through online, tv and magazine ads. Instead, they need to interact with consumers through social media to help spread word of their product.
Particularly, at 2:59, the video says that society is no longer searching for products and services and that products and services will find us. I believe this to be true. As many other women in Australia can probably attest, there is a particular brand/product called Ashy Bines Clean Eating Diet Plan, or something similar. Daily, my Facebook newsfeed is infiltrated with photos of people who have lost weight through the plan or advertisements of the plan or simply people (who I don't know) talking about the plan. Ever since Facebook introduced the fact that you can now see pages your friends have liked on Facebook (whether they liked the page that day or not), Ashy Bines has been taking over my newsfeed.
Regardless of whether or not my Facebook thinks I need to lose weight, the fact that I know the name of the product and what it does says something about the fact that social media has significantly helped the Ashy Bines product.
I believe social media is just as helpful to journalists, particularly online ones, in this way.
Journalists have the ability to harness the same social media power. If journalists consider themselves a brand, or at least the organisation they work for, they can use the same marketing techniques as products.
Firstly, journalists have to find their audience on social media. This means not simply tweeting to your followers, but following back journalists, journalism students, PR companies, media relations officers, and many more. Secondly, and on a related note, journalists have to engage with their audience. They need to reply to questions, thank people for their comments or concerns, and start conversations around interesting topics. This will help the audience to feel like they have a personal connection with you, the journalist, which will undoubtedly help to create a stronger audience.
Thirdly, journalists must also market themselves. They need to be able to promote their stories, their colleagues stories and their organisation. Facebook has introduced a new 'promote' button for specialised pages. What journalists should do is create a page about themselves. For exmaple, I have created a 'Rebecca Gillies' page for my food blog, which people 'like' but are not 'friends' with. This means whenever I post under that account, I can promote my posts, which means my personal account's friends and those who have liked the professional page will see the post at the top of their newsfeed (which is when people pay the most attention to posts).
As for Twitter, journalists need to ensure their tweets about their stories are being retweeted or favourited or in some way, being passed on to others. One way of doing this is to write a tweet that says something similar to this: 'Retweet if you agree with the latest election polls, covered in detail on www.myblog.com'.
Finally, and this is only something online journalists can do, but remember to always link back to your organisation's site or your story or your blog. This ensures that readers are always being reminded of who wrote the story and it is helping to build up your brand.
These are just some ideas I have had as to how journalists can market themselves as a brand. These days, everything is a brand, including individuals. Journalists need to embrace this and learn how to use social media to ruthlessly target their audience into reading what they have to say. I am in no way an expert on how to use social media, but my blog (Half Baked) has a small but dedicated following and I am happy with how I have created a small, personal brand around a simple food blog. I think professional journalists can do the same things I did with much bigger and better results.
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