#Tip: Take a look at engagement data for your own tweets

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Keen to get a better understanding of how people are engaging with your social media activity, beyond spotting the odd retweet or favourite? Ever send a tweet out and wonder how many people clicked through to the relevant link? Well, as reported by The Next Web, users can now easily access these sorts of analytics via Twitter Ads. It is simple to do – as The Next Web outlines, and offers great insight into what happens after you send a tweet.

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#Tip: Install these Twitter add-ons for easily quoting and bookmarking articles

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Although 140 characters is a concise and scannable method of presenting news and stories from a readers point of view, sometimes whittling down those words can be a painful and laborious process.

There are, however, a few pieces of software that can sweeten the pill, as Amit Agarwal details in this blog post over at Digital Inspiration.

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: Three handy Twitter tools

An article by the Guardian last week sparked a discussion on Twitter about the difference between the numbers shown on a ‘tweet’ share count button and the number of retweets.

Retweets

Official Twitter RTs have been around since 2009. When a tweet is retweeted in this way Twitter does not treat it as a separate tweet so the RT does not have a separate URL. Twitter measures RTs by the number of times the original tweet was RTed.

Share count buttons

The share count buttons on a news story show the number of times the story URL has been tweeted out. It includes RTs as the they carry the URL. This number will therefore be greater than the number of RTs.

Example:

For example, this Journalism.co.uk story on 100 Twitter accounts every journalism student should follow received 131 RTs, according to My Top Tweets (see below).

The URL of the story was shared 1,735 times on Twitter, according to LinkTally (see below).

Three handy Twitter tools

Online tools for analysing your top tweets, the number of times and article has been shared and how many people your tweet has reached.

My Top Tweets

This shows the most RTed tweets from a particular Twitter account.

LinkTally

This measures how many times a URL has been shared. It shows share numbers for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

TweetReach

This measures how many people each tweet reaches.

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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 of the day for journalists: Use the Twitter phone app for alerts

You may opt to use one of the third-party Twitter apps on your phone (such as Tweetbot or Neatly), but it is worth adding Twitter’s own app so you can use your phone as a second screen to keep an eye on any Twitter accounts you manage.

If you manage several Twitter accounts, adding all accounts to the app on your phone provides a really handy way of keeping an eye on activity. If you use a computer set up with a single screen, having the alerts display on your phone can be useful while working, plus it allows you to keep track at evenings and weekends.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Add Twitter search to your browser

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Today’s tip is to add a Twitter address bar search browser extension. That will mean you can search Twitter from the search bar at the top of your web browser.

The Firefox extension is at this link, or you can use the search dropdown to ‘manage search engines’ and access this search option and more.

The Chrome extension is at this link. This extension adds a search bar to Chrome (which will appear as a magnifying glass logo), with Twitter as one of the options.

You can carryout hashtag searches, user searches or enter Twitter advanced operators. For more on searching social media see this guide.

You might also like to add a Creative Commons Search option to Firefox, which was Monday’s tip of the day.

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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.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Pointers for covering events live on Twitter

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Trinity Mirror’s digital publishing director David Higgerson has produced a series of practical tips on ways he thinks journalists and news outlets can best offer live coverage of events on Twitter.

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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Is Vine useful for journalists? A round-up of reactions to the launch Twitter’s micro-video app

Twitter’s latest expansion into social media arrived last Thursday in the form of micro-video sharing app Vine, allowing users to create and upload six-second videos to be shared and commented on.

Teething problems aside, users have been creating stop animations and how-to guides alongside sport round-ups and animal GIFs.

But could Vine become a serious journalistic resource? Or will it simply be another addition to a long line of internet distractions with a few diamonds in the rough? Commentators have been giving their opinions on the matter.

Scott Klemmer, co-director of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University told Wired that, based on the enthusiasm for Twitter, the results will be positive from a creative point of view and “people are going to do really cool things”.

One of the things we know about creativity is that constraints are essential for getting people to do creative stuff. If you come up with the right constraints that’s a benefit, not a drawback. And nobody knows that better than Twitter, where their 140-character constraint really created a whole new medium in a lot of ways.

UX expert and blogger Martin Belam dismisses those who don’t “see a purpose” in Vine, insisting that there is as much fun to be had in the process of creation as in browsing the product.

I do rather wonder, if you are looking at a bunch of random video clips that weren’t directly shared with you, and they don’t meet your content expectations, whether the problem might be your expectations, not the service?

Poynter recognises the potential for growth in that videos have more potential for realism and engagement, drawing people closer to the story or news event being reported, as Jeff Sonderman writes.

Think of the impact Twitter has made so far on real-time reporting, making everyone, everywhere, a potential instant eyewitness who can share text or a photo with the world. Now think of how that effect is amplified when the public can easily start sharing videos of the same events.

At Sonderman points out, it also means it is much harder to for videos to be faked, especially when it is considered that Vine is only available to smart devices and videos can only be uploaded straight to the server, rather than saved remotely and tampered with.

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#Podcast: How news outlets use live Q&As to engage the audience

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News outlets and journalists have taken to a number of different platforms to host live Q&A chats with their community; from Twitter and Google+ Hangouts, to Quora and Reddit, as well as on their own websites using liveblogs or the article comment facility.

Just last week, for example, the Daily Post in North Wales launched a new weekly liveblog Q&A, which will feature a different expert each week who will answer questions on a given subject.

In this week’s podcast we look at some of the different approaches to live text-based Q&As and panel chats taken by news outlets and individual journalists, as well as gather some useful tips for running a successful Q&A.

We hear from:

• Mark Luckie, manager of journalism and news, Twitter
• Chris Hamilton, social media editor, BBC News
• Tom Standage, digital editor, the Economist
• Kate Hodge, senior content co-ordinator, Guardian Careers

Podcast: Download

There are also a number of journalism-related Twitter chats run on a regular basis. Here is a list of 50 which may be of interest, compiled by OnlineUniversities.com.

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