You can check the score of your Facebook page using EdgeRank Checker.

There is no charge to run a score search and find out the best and worst days for your Facebook page.

You can find out more on EdgeRank, Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, by reading our guide on how to best post news on Twitter and Facebook.  Tip number five explains how EdgeRank filters your fans’ newsfeeds to give them the news that Facebook thinks they will be most interested in

You can become a fan of Journalism.co.uk on Facebook.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Why Facebook comments are worth more than likes
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: timing your Facebook posts
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – try ScraperWiki’s new screencasts
• How newspapers can use Facebook more effectively
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – the Facebook + Journalists page

Click the above image to connect with Journalism.co.uk on Facebook

After taking a look at the top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011 and the top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011, we’ve compiled a list of the most shared, liked and commented on Journalism.co.uk news stories and blog posts published in 2011.

1. Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (5,268 likes, 1,523 shares, 768 comments)

2. Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month (613 likes, 85 shares, 95 comments)

3. BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters (98 likes, 172 shares, 80 comments)

4. Daily Mail criticised over Amanda Knox guilty story (53 likes, 86 shares, 138 comments)

5. How to: become a roaming reporter (62 likes, 37 shares, 85 comments)

6. Al Jazeera English hits US screens after New York cable deal (75 likes, 60 shares, 33 comments)

7. ‘Is there a better way of doing this?’: Johann Hari responds to plagiarism accusations (12 likes, 47 shares, 88 comments)

8. Bahrain to sue Independent over ‘defamatory’ articles (99 likes, 31 shares, 2 comments)

9. #jpod: How journalists can best use Facebook pages (58 likes, 53 shares, 4 comments)

10. London riots: Five ways journalists used online tools (40 likes, 64 shares, 10 comments)

Data was gathered using Searchmetrics.

Similar Posts:

• Journalism.co.uk top 10 stories on Twitter in 2011
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 24 June-1 July
• MediaGuardian: Independent editor to rule on Johann Hari plagiarism claims
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 30 July-5 August
• BuzzMachine: ‘Cable companies, add Al Jazeera English NOW!’

The Facebook + Journalists page outlines in a post how news outlets can live stream news events from their own pages on the platform. This post offers a step-by-step guide to using Facebook’s “live stream application”.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – the Facebook + Journalists page
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – tagging advice for newsrooms
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – improving political reporting with social media
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – publishing data online
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – social media metrics

Tool of the week: Rippla

What is it? A tool that allows you to monitor the social media “ripples” of a news story

How is it of use to journalists? Rippla was launched last month as a tool that tracks how news and information reaches into people’s conversations on social media.

It may be interesting to find out that the story with the most “ripples” is currently the Mail Online’s Hilarious video shows cat stroking crying baby and sending him to sleep, followed by George Monbiot’s Guardian comment This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, But what is particularly helpful for journalists is the ripples tracker.

Ripples tracker allows you to enter the URL or a news story and see how many times it has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and find out how many bit.ly click-throughs the post has received.

Rippla also offers news sites a widget than can be added (as embedded below), which displays the most socially shared news stories.

Similar Posts:

• Rippla, a site to monitor the social media ‘ripples’ of news stories, launches
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 12-18 November
• Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets
• Three ways to get a round-up of news shared by your contacts without checking Twitter
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 17-23 December

It is worth keeping an eye on Facebook’s “Facebook + Journalists” page which launched earlier this year and features lots of useful tips and pointers on how to get the most out of the social media network as a reporter.

Here is a link to the page.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – student blogging tips
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – live streaming on Facebook
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Facebook page for journalists
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – create newsletter tabs in Facebook
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to check the score of your Facebook page

Tool of the week: Facebook Search

What is it? A tool that allows you to search Facebook without logging in

How is it of use to journalists? Social media searches have become a key part of newsgathering process. This tool is a search engine for Facebook. It allows you to search if you are not logged in of if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Based on Facebook’s API, it allows you to search posts, photos, people, pages, groups and events.

As well as being useful for searching by keyword, it is also a good way to test to see if the page for your news site comes up in a search.Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Using Facebook, Twitter and Storify for political coverage
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• Facebook launches page for journalists
• News sites can now create a branded page on Foursquare
• Paper.li adds Facebook to social newspaper function

Facebook has this afternoon released its own list of the top news stories of 2011.

Yesterday Journalism.co.uk published a list of top 10 Facebook stories. We looked at total numbers of shares, likes and comments (you can find the source data at this link)

Today’s list differs as it is based on the number of clicks each article received after being posted, liked or shared.

It is interesting to compare the “most clicked” and “most shared, liked and commented” lists. Note that recent stories such as the Sun’s “tatt-poo” story did not feature in yesterday’s list as it was published too recently to appear in the Searchmetrics data.

The number of clicks the Guardian has received has no doubt been influenced by its new Facebook app launched on 22 September. Last week Facebook reported the app was delivering an additional one million clicks a day for the Guardian.

Here is Facebook’s list of top news stories published by UK news outlets, which was released at the Le Web conference taking place in Paris.

1. BBC: The World at Seven Billion

2. The Sun: Tatt-poo for cheating

3. The Guardian: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

4. BBC: Amy Winehouse: Tributes paid to dead singer

5. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo

6. The Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it
anyway?

7. The Guardian: The meaning of 9/11′s most controversial photo

8.  Daily Mail: Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat
after suspected ‘drug overdose’

9. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg

10. BBC: ‘Brinicle’ ice finger of death filmed in Antarctic

11.  Daily Mail: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra

12. The Sun: Frankie Cocozza kicked off X Factor

13. BBC: Japan earthquake: Footage of moment tsunami hit

14. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama

15. The Guardian: Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake

16. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east

17.  BBC: Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern

18. BBC: Arrest over video of ‘racist rant’ on Croydon to Wimbledon
tram

19. Daily Mail: Loyal to the end: Heart-breaking photo shows Navy SEAL’s devoted dog guarding his coffin

20. BBC: LIVE: Osama Bin Laden deadSimilar Posts:

• Top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011
• Top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011
• CNN’s missed opportunity with Bin Laden tape
• Media release: StumbleUpon is most important content sharing site for Mail Online
• Journalism.co.uk’s top 10 stories on Facebook in 2011

Facebook last week published a list of the most shared articles on Facebook in 2011. That list included only US publishers – so we decided to create a list of the most shared, liked and commented articles from UK news outlets.

This list is based on data from SEO and social data tool Searchmetrics.

As with the US list, stories range from hard news to quirky (or “cute”, as Facebook describes them). Interestingly, the two top stories are newsgames, where the reader is invited to participate using gaming mechanics. (It’s worth mentioning here that there will be a session on newsgames and gaming mechanics at our news:rewired conference for journalists, for which the agenda is here.) The list also includes online video (another news:rewired topic).

The top 10 most shared, commented and liked Facebook news articles of 2011:

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 339,149 (shares, comments and likes)

2. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 219,023

3. Mail Online: Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’ = 190,498

4. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 167,754

5. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 159,023

6. BBC: Breast milk ice cream goes on sale in Covent Garden = 149,509

7. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 146,244

8. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 146,182

9. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 145,413

10. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 131,839

Top 10 most shared news articles on Facebook in 2011

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 147,000

2. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 65,820

3. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 60,238

4. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 54,800

5. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 44,700

6. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 38,891

7. BBC: Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern = 36,700

8. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 36,500

9. Mail Online: Meet the blind Great Dane in need of a home (but you’ll need to make space for HER huge guide dog) = 34,600

10. BBC: Amy Winehouse: Tributes paid to dead singer = 31,400

Top 10 most ‘liked’ articles on Facebook

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 75,619

2. Mail Online: The 9/11 rescue dogs: Portraits of the last surviving animals who scoured Ground Zero one decade on = 62,458

3. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 61,306

4. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 51,618

5. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 49,882

6. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 47,449

7. Mail Online – Beauty in every grain: For the first time remarkable photographs reveal hidden charms of ordinary SAND = 43,760

8. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 42799

9. Mail Online: Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer’s camera to take hilarious self-portraits

10. The Sun: Frankie Cocozza 
kicked off X Factor

Top 10 most commented news articles on Facebook in 2011

1. Mail Online: Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’ = 127,396

2. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 116,530

3. BBC: Breast milk ice cream goes on sale in Covent Garden = 108,258

4. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 105,754

5. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 73,350

6. BBC: Amy Winehouse: Tributes paid to dead singer = 72,313

7. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 71,514

8. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 68,830

9. Independent: US preacher warns end of the world is nigh: 21 May, around 6pm, to be precise = 67,388

10. BBC: Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern = 59,824

Data was gathered using Searchmetrics and downloaded for analysis on 6 December. The news outlets included were: BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mail Online, the Sun, the Mirror. You can see the downloaded Facebook data here.Similar Posts:

• Top 20 most clicked news stories on Facebook in 2011
• Top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011
• Media release: StumbleUpon is most important content sharing site for Mail Online
• Journalism.co.uk’s top 10 stories on Facebook in 2011
• Beehive City: Facebook and Twitter offer clearer picture of Japanese earthquake

The Guardian’s Facebook app is generating almost a million extra page impressions per day, according to figures released by the news outlet and by Facebook.

Two months on from its launch at Facebook’s f8 conference in London the app has been installed by over four million users.

The news outlet also believes that the app is engaging a younger audience, as over half (56.7 per cent) of the app’s users are 24 and under and 16.7 per cent are 17 and under.

Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group, said in a statement:

As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations

The Independent, the other UK-based news outlet to launch a Facebook app following f8 on 22 September, is reporting that it has more than one million monthly active users connecting their Facebook accounts.

The integration has bumped up older articles that have gone viral through social distribution, according to the Facebook post detailing the statistics.

The news organisation found that many of the “most shared” and “most viewed” stories on the site have been from the late 1990s, “a result of the increased social virility”.

The Guardian and Independent both took a different approach when building their Facebook appshe Guardian focused on the reading experience within Facebook, the shared reading experience for the Independent takes place on the news site.

Yahoo! News, which like the Independent integrated the app into its site, has reported that 10 million people are using the app, with Yahoo! News experiencing a 600 per cent increase in traffic coming from Facebook as a result.

People who connect to Facebook on Yahoo! read more articles than the average user, the Facebook post states.

Like the Guardian, the Washington Post built a social reader app for Facebook as a companion for its website with the social sharing taking place within Facebook. It has drawn more than 3.5 million monthly active users so far. The Facebook post states that the social reader is growing, especially among international audiences and younger readers, with 83 per cent of readers under 35 years old.

According to Facebook, the statistics released last night show that the apps do five things:

1. Show recommendations to increase engagement. Keep people engaged by prominently showing friends’ recent activity on your main pages and pages with high exit rates. When no social content is available, surface personalised recommendations based on users’ interests on Facebook and clearly explain why you’re showing each recommendation.

2. Create compelling objects. Maximise the click through rates of your stories by specifying Open Graph tags for all your articles and including compelling images, titles and descriptions. Avoid misleading images or titles to prevent your app from being marked as spam, which will negatively impact your app’s distribution in news feed.

3. Leverage your existing user base. If you have an existing site, be sure to make connecting a prominent option for existing users. And if people are already sharing your content on Facebook, consider sending referral traffic from Facebook into a flow that makes it easy for people to have a social experience on your site.

4. Make the benefits of sharing clear. Open Graph apps are designed for people that want to share. In your app, you should clearly explain how your app works and the benefits of adding your app to their timeline. Choose an approach that makes the most sense for your users, whether that’s an informative dialog, in-line marketing messaging, house ad inventory, and/or a learn more page.

5.  Keep users in control. As we’ve previously highlighted, people are more active when they are in control. In addition to the privacy controls on Facebook, we encourage you to build controls into your app that fit how people use your app.

Similar Posts:

• ‘We wanted to make ourselves more Facebookey’, says Guardian
• Hearsay, a non-Facebook way of social news sharing
• Malcolm Coles: Michael Jackson’s kids made the Daily Mail the most visited UK newspaper site in June
• Nieman: Blogs, SEO chief and Facebook comments result in traffic increase for LA Times
• Why news sites should consider adding the LinkedIn share button

Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr.

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts.

How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains.

Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities.

These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject.

Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists.

Grill added:

The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community.

You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowsr, gave an inspiring speech at the Strata Summit in September on how a TV ratings system such as Nielsen could soon be replaced by social media data thanks to the advanced online analytics that PeopleBrowsr offers.

Playground’s development is based on feedback from its community of users, which has been very responsive. Ideas can be sent to contact[@]peoplebrowsr.com or by tweeting @peoplebrowsr.Similar Posts:

• Tool of the week for journalists – TwentyFeet, analytics for your site and social networks
• Brand Republic: MySpace gives advertisers more control with new platform
• BuzzData, a ‘social network for people who work with data’
• Tool of the week for journalists – Duedil, ‘Lexis-Nexis-meets-Google-meets-LinkedIn’
• Newsbeat, an analytics tool just for news sites, launches

Rippla has today launched as a site to track how news stories are shared via social media.

Take a look at the home screen and you will see stories generating the most shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and bit.ly.

The site has been created by journalist and political blogger Sunny Hundal who told Journalism.co.uk Rippla “scrapes news feeds from the UK’s 10 biggest news sites and then ranks them by popularity across social networks. It measures how many ‘ripples’ they’ve created.

The second great feature of this site is the widget, which allows you to enter the URL of a news story from your site and see the social media “ripples” it has created.

Hundal said he created the site for two reasons:

First, I want to track how well media organisations do on social media. The site updates and collects the data every hour.

Second, the longer term aim is to provide people an opportunity to consume content based on what their peers are sharing / reading, rather than simply based on what the newspaper front-page offers. As you know, patterns of media consumption are changing and we think this is the way its all heading.

The site will be in beta for some time while bugs are fixed and functionality is added.Similar Posts:

• Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories
• MediaShift: Why news organisations should use ‘linked data’
• #WANIndia2009: Social media for news orgs – a global perspective
• Memeburn: Could Intel’s tech news site start a corporate media trend?
• Five of the best Tumblr news blogs

A Facebook comment is worth more than a like, which is worth more than a click, according to Jeff Widman, co-founder of analytics tool PageLever.

The greater the engagement you have with your fans on Facebook, the more prominent position your content will be in their news feeds.

This is an important fact to understand if you are a journalist managing your news organisation’s Facebook page.

Speaking in this week’s Journalism.co.uk podcast on the best time and frequency for news organisations to post to Twitter and Facebook, Widman clearly explains how Facebook’s algorithm, EdgeRank, works.

Don’t just post like a status update. Post it in a way that tries to get people to comment or like. The reason you’re doing that is you’re trying to get people to take actions that explicitly show the algorithm that they are interested in your content.

Facebook is watching all the explicit actions the user takes. It is watching if a user comes and visits your fan page, it is watching if a user clicks on your content, it is watching if a user clicks like or shares. However, a comment is worth more than a like is worth more than a click.

If people are clicking your status updates that’s good, but you’re going to get a lot more glue (Facebook calls it affinity) between the user and the publisher if they’re leaving a comment.

Listen to this week’s podcast for or more tips on posting to Facebook.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: timing your Facebook posts
• Mashable: How to work out the best time to post on your Facebook page
• Facebook on how news organisations can best use the social network
• Facebook study finds Independent’s content was shared and liked 136,000 times in one month
• #jpod: What is the best time and frequency to post to Twitter and Facebook?

This Mail Online article was the most shared, the Searchmetrics study found

Fifteen times more links to Mail Online articles are shared worldwide via StumbleUpon than on Twitter, according to a study by Searchmetrics.

During the six month period analysed, just over half (50.78 per cent) of links to Mail Online articles were shared on StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter just 3.21 per cent.

More than half (56.77 per cent) of the Guardian’s social links came from Facebook, with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent, according to the study.

In a release, Dr Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics said:

Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site. This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon.

The most frequently shared content on the Mail Online was said to be an article (with images) about the earthquake in Japan which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. The Guardian’s most frequently shared content was reportedly a humorous quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen.

The Mail Online’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. The big pictures: The moment Japan’s cataclysmic tsunami engulfed a nation = 392,521 links

2. Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’  = 253,561 links

3. Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra =

252,650 links

The Guardian’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 363,938 links

2. Detroit in ruins = 210,468 links

3. Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media = 187,987 links

The Mail Online and the Guardian are the most visible UK newspaper websites on social networks such as Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, according to a separate 10-week study by Searchmetrics, which analysed how often content from 12 leading newspaper sites was shared on six popular social networking and bookmarking sites.

Mail Online came out on top, with links to its pages being shared 2,908,779 times a week on average. The Guardian came second with an average 2,587,258 links being shared on social sites every week.

The Searchmetrics study monitored links shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google+ over a period of 10 weeks.

Average social links per week of UK newspaper websites

• Mail Online  = 2,908,779 links/week
• Guardian= 2,587,258 links/week
• Telegraph = 879,783 links/week
• Independent = 617,148 links/week
• The Sun = 195,311 links/week
• FT = 83,382 links/week
• Daily Record  = 82,151 links/week
• Mirror = 54,881 links/week
• Herald Scotland = 13,063 links/week
• Express = 9,600 links/week
• Daily Star  = 702 links/week
• The Times = 256 links/week

Seachmetrics’ CEO Joepen added:

Social news – that is news and articles that are shared or recommended by your friends and followers on social sites – is potentially an important source of traffic for online news sites.

It’s worth noting that search engines, such as Google and Bing are starting to include popularity on social networks as a factor when judging the quality of web pages and how they should be ranked in search listings. So it’s important for news and other web sites to build and monitor visibility on social sites if they want to rank highly and attract visitors via search.

The data for the study was taken from the global social media database which Searchmetrics operates to power its online software tools.Similar Posts:

• Study of French news sites: Facebook sends 13 times more referrals than Twitter
• StumbleUpon releases new widget for news sites
• New study measures social media success of national newspapers
• Is Facebook falling out of favour?
• WebProNews: Twitterers want news links, suggests ad network survey

Free online tools and social networks are being used around the world in journalism, from students to startups to national news organisations.

If you’re doing political coverage in any capacity at any level, Poynter’s Mallory Jean Tenore has some great tips for using Facebook, Twitter, and Storify.

Here’s one tip for each. See the full list on Poynter at this link.

Facebook

Gauge how open/accessible politicians are. Republican State Rep. Justin Amash was one of the first legislators to post all of his votes on his Facebook Fan Page. What does this level of transparency say about a politicians’ willingness to be open with voters?

Twitter

Dig up the past. One of the limitations of Twitter’s built-in search tool is that it doesn’t let you search for tweets from months and years ago. But there are other Twitter search tools that do. Topsy, for instance, lets you search for tweets from as far back as three years ago. To do this, go to Topsy’s advanced search page and where it says “Search a specific type,” click on “tweets.” This tool is good for seeing what politicians tweeted at a particular time in their campaigns.

Storify

Highlight voters’ reactions/politicians’ posts from various social networks. Storify is a great tool for organizing social media stories because it enables you to pull together Facebook posts and tweets and add context to them. Several news organizations used Storify last year on Election Day to highlight voters’ voices.

Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use Topsy to search the social web
• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• #bbcsms: Storify summary of the BBC Social Media Summit
• Breaking News becomes a Storify source

How frequently should news organisations post to Facebook? How often should the headline of a news story be tweeted? Why do some of your Facebook fans get to see your stories and others do not?

Three experts in social media optimisation (SMO) have the answers.

In this podcast Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall talks to Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever, an Facebook analytics company used by four of the top 10 Facebook pages; Jiri Voves, co-founder of Socialbakers, which aims to be the top provider of Facebook statistics; and Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer.

 Similar Posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Why Facebook comments are worth more than likes
• Mashable: How to work out the best time to post on your Facebook page
• Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets
• #jpod: How journalists can best use Facebook pages
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: timing your Facebook posts