#Podcast: Growing social media communities

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This week’s podcast looks at:

• How Future builds social media communities before launching a new product;
• How a wedding title retains brides-to-be within their social media communities after their big day;
• Tips on community building from the Guardian, which this week passed the 1 million followers milestone on its @Guardian flagship account.

Journalism.co.uk technology editor Sarah Marshall speaks to:

• Katherine Radarecht, group publisher at Future 
• Victoria Joy, online editor at YouAndYourWedding.co.uk, an Immediate Media title
• Laura Oliver, community manager, the Guardian

Podcast: Download

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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#Tip: Try these tips to boost your hyperlocal Facebook page

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Pictures. Personality. Timeliness. Tips and tools for building online communities can sometimes seem rather general but blogger and journalist Ed Walker decided to put them all into practice for his hyperlocal site Blog Preston.

See how it worked for him and the detailed highlights of what made his month long campaign a success in this blog post.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip: Facebook to introduce comment replies and more

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Facebook this week announced it would be introducing new features for comments which will, according to a post by journalism programme manager Vadim Lavrusik, enable journalists to “reply directly to comments left on your Page content and start conversation threads”.

Lavrusik says discussions will also be “re-ordered by relevance to viewers” and those considered the most “active and engaging” will also work their way to the top.

According to the Facebook for Journalists post, the new functionality, which users can opt-in to, will be available on pages from 10 July. Lavrusik adds that it will also “be automatically turned on for profiles with more than 10,000 followers”.

Incidentally, Lavrusik will be delivering the keynote speech at news:rewired on Friday 19 April.

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#Tip: Keep an eye out for the launch of Google Capture for Hangouts

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If you use Google+ Hangouts out at your news outlet, you might like to know that Jeremy Ng from Google has this week announced Google Capture, a tool for taking photos during a Hangout.

Mashable explains more:

The app lets Hangout users take photos of a Hangout in progress, saving all of those photos to a shared folder available to all Hangout invitees. Photos can be viewed while you’re in the Hangout, while you’re browsing through your photo albums, and by visiting the original Hangout post on Google+.

The post adds:

The Hangouts Capture app will be available worldwide soon within the traditional Hangouts app, alongside YouTube and Effects.

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#Tip: Visualise your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ connections

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The Data Driven Journalism site has an explainer telling you how to visualise your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ connections using a tool called Gephi.

The post is written by Tony Hirst and is a cross post from his OUseful blog.

He explains how he has visualised the @WiredUK Twitter connections.

As a journalist you might want to try visualising your own network, but it could also be interesting to study connections of a key person within your news beat.

Here’s the post.

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#Tip: Pointers for growing your Twitter following

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While it may not all be about quantity, journalists and news outlets alike are undoubtedly keen to grow a large, and engaged community on social networks with which to share and discuss their content. This how-to by David Beard on the Poynter Institute website runs through  a list of “eight ways to attract more Twitter followers” looking at both the content being tweeted as well as the way the tweet itself is constructed.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip: Use the Banjo app as a journalism search tool

We’ve recommended the Banjo app (for Android and iOS) in the past.

The free location-based app encourages you to connect your social networks, and you then can see which of your connections are nearby. You can also search cities to see what your social media contacts, their connections and other Banjo users are tweeting and sharing in those locations.

Banjo was a Journalism.co.uk app of the week just over a year ago, and before that journalism site 10,000 Words has described how a reporter used it to locate people at a shopping mall where there had been a reported bomb scare.

Banjo also has a handy filter function that allows you to search your social media posts sent near you for a keyword. The top right image filters for the term “journalist” in posts sent close to Hackney, London. The search shows the word was used in two recent social media posts and is in 48 profiles.

Yesterday The Next Web reported that there are now 4 million Banjo users, and highlighted algorithm updates.

Today’s tip is to try Banjo if you do not yet use it. It could come in useful when trying to find someone at a particular location when you are working on a news story.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Blogging pointers for those starting out

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Wannabe Hacks blogger Caroline Mortimer offers some useful pointers for those starting out in journalism and who want to get their own blog up and running. Her tips aim to help those getting started with a blog get theirs to stand out from the crowd.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: 12 tips for using Storify

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Last month digital publishing director for Trinity Mirror regionals David Higgerson blogged about Storify and the way journalists can use it to curate and search social media. Here is his post outlining 12 tips on using the platform.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Verifying Twitter content

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Digital First Media’s digital transformation editor Steve Buttry has produced a detailed post outlining a series of techniques for verifying content on Twitter.

Last year, Journalism.co.uk also produced a how-to guide on verifying content shared on social media.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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