5 Ways to Improve Your Use of Twitter

Twitter is a social networking tool that allows us to share short messages (140 characters or less) with the people who 'follow' us; and we can follow them back and receive their messages.

I tend to use Twitter more for gathering information about people in the know and happenings around the city I cover - New Haven, Conn. But I find these five tricks have helped me increase the visibility of the Tweets I share and I hope they are useful for you as well.

1. Include a picture.
When I'm out in the field, I now use my smartphone (Droid X) to send out Tweets that set the scene while my assignment is unfolding. I snap the picture, hit the menu button, click share and then select Twitter. The App allows me to type a message about the photo and off to the network it goes.

This has been big fun and from the feedback I've gotten, people enjoy it.

2. Use hashtags.
Including a hashtag or pound (#) sign, can increase the reach of your Tweets because people who may not be following you, but filter the hashtag, will see your posts. For example, the people and organizations in New Haven who do not follow me but follow the hashtag for the city #NHV see my Tweets and often retweet them or my post will catch their eye and they'll choose to follow me.

3. Tap into a URL shortener with metrics.
I use bit.ly, which is a popular one that can linked with third-party applications that help sort tweets such as TweetDeck. Bit.ly has an "Analyze" tab that tells me how many clicks each link received, who has shared the link (via Twitter name), and the referring sites where people found the link - in other words, the sites where it was posted such as Facebook or TweetDeck or shared by e-mail.

I can also see what countries people were in when they clicked the link. It's great intel.

4. Engage in two-way conversations.
You shouldn't feel obligated to follow everyone who follows you, particularly the spammers, but when someone does, say thank you. When your followers post a query that you have an opinion about or expertise on a topic, chime in.

Too many people use Twitter to spout links and never interact beyond that. Watch for what others are talking about, join the conversation, thank people for retweets and mentions. Engaging with the online community will help grow your network and sphere of influence and crowdsourcing becomes easier.

5. Organize with third-party applications.
I use TweetDeck to filter tweets by topics, organizations and individual followers. It is impossible for me as a working professional to sit in front of the computer all day to watch my Twitter feed. TweetDeck allows me to check in several times a day, see what I've missed and share anything new on my plate.

Hootsuite enables me to schedule Tweets that will go live at a later time.

Scale in newsrooms isn't just about numbers & metrics, it's about IDEAS!

My ideaLab colleagues and I were given 30 days to address a need in our newsrooms. After considering several possible projects, I settled on something in my arsenal of favorite tools: Google maps.
So, the plan was to teach my fellow reporters how to plot sites on a Google map so there always would be someone in the newsroom with that skill, even on nights and weekends when we often have breaking crime, fire, accident and other stories that lend well to using maps.

Simultaneously, I was data mining for a separate ideaLab project and planned on doing an enterprise story about 27 brownfields in New Haven County. These locations are targeted by the state and several municipalities as priority sites for economic development, among dozens of eyesores that are languishing.

As part of the ideaLab, we have semi-monthly teleconferences as a group. On one of these calls my mentor Jon Cooper, vice president of content for our parent company, Journal Register Co. and supervisor of the ideaLab, urged us to work harder at getting the knowledge and skills we're learning into the daily workflow at our newsrooms.

That got me thinkin': Why don't we work as a group to map the brownfields and craft the enterprise story?

It seemed the perfect way to foster skills learning and meet Jon's challenge.

I pitched it to my colleagues who cover the towns on the brownfields list I was working off of and they not only participated in the Google maps training, they did reporting leg work, shot videos and built this map:

View New Haven County Brownfields in a larger map

I'm talking about shoe-leather reporters Amanda Pinto, Abbe Smith, Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, Mark Zaretsky and Ann DeMatteo. I invited reporters who did not have an affected town, as well, so here's a shout out to Alexandra Sanders, who came to the training and subsequently made this map, using satellite view, to go with a daily story about neighborhood reaction to a controversial excavation site:


View Horse Pond Rd & Dairy Hill Rd in a larger map

City Editor Helen Bennett Harvey and Managing Editor Mark Brackenbury came to the training and project planning meeting as well. Everyone made this project better than I envisioned with their feedback and questions.

We've had great conversations about the fact that maps don't apply to everything we file, but we all have more open minds now to new applications. Alexandra had a great idea about using them to map polling places and here's an example of how I now use them to tell people what's happening in New Haven on weekends or upcoming civic events during the week.


View Elm City Happenings in a larger map

A nice feature is that Google tells people how to get there by car, foot, bike or public transportation. It's just an amazing tool.

And participating in the ideaLab has been an amazing process of personal and professional growth for which I am grateful.

I hope this encourages you to think about using Google maps in new and different ways and engaging your colleagues in what can be a fun project for your team and an interactive, informative package for consumers.

Our package went live on Sunday morning, May 8 (Mother's Day) and ranked among "Most Popular" all day on the New Haven Register's website.

Sunday evening Pam McLoughlin and Jordan Fenster got a Google Form loaded into the package, using the story itself as an engagement tool. It was posted later than the full package, so I'm still collecting data on that for a separate post.

Hold the faith that people will read content other than crime, accidents and news of the weird if it is engaging, interactive and speaks to their quality of life (Digital First). Thanks, again, everybody!

So, let's keep the ideas flowing - how are you using Google or other mapping programs in your news organization?