Social media for more than just promotion: 15 tips for journalists

Cordelia Hebblethwaite points out in her Twitter bio that her delightful name is too long for the platform. But that hasn’t stopped the veteran journalist from knowing a thing or two about social media.

She was a founder and lead blogger for BBC Trending, the service’s blog covering stories trending on social media, and she’s doing a yearlong fellowship at Stanford where she’s “exploring how journalists can exploit the full potential of social media.”

That’s according to the bio on a piece she wrote for the International Journalists’ Network headlined “15 tools to help journalists navigate social media.” Hebblethwaite writes:

Journalists are used to promoting their work on social media. But there’s also lots of scope for journalists to use social media as a reporting tool—to find stories, for newsgathering, research, finding interviewees and more.

But where to start? At a recent presentation I gave in Italy, I included a slide on this, and noted a lot of furious scribbling. There’s clearly appetite for this. So here’s a list of tips and tools that I find useful.

As the headline promises, she lists 15 of them, ranging from the familiar, like LinkedIn and Twitter lists, to, well, the unfamiliar. At least to me. I’ve never heard of CrowdTangle or GramFeed.

I’d also never heard of Nuzzel before reading Hebblethwaite’s piece, but it’s quickly become a favorite site. It filters your social media feeds to show you the stories that are being shared by your friends. Here’s my public feed, which is to say the stories being shared by the people I follow. Not surprisingly, it’s a list of stories I find interesting.

As a reminder, Bleacher Report last week posted its new Social Media Guidelines.