Social media has changed journalism in so many ways. The big platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have created new opportunities to engage with audiences, shape storytelling and understand new metrics, says Tamara Baluja, social media editor, CBC.
On her webinar 'A journalist's guide: five ways to use social media', she points out that social media strategy must be deliberate and intentional to reap the full rewards, rather than a hit-and-hope approach.
Amplification of traffic, for example, can be achieved by putting links to your content out on tweets and posts in the hope of drawing in audiences. However, newsrooms need to think about the effectiveness of this strategy.
"It's good because it creates brand awareness and you can get a lot of traffic, but in some ways it's counter-intuitive to what these platforms would like you to do. They would prefer you spend your time on those platforms creating content that lives there, rather than using it as an opportunity to funnel elsewhere.
"It's a balancing act, it's something that news organisations need to figure out what specific portion of content they create and their strategy is going to be concentrated on amplification versus native content."
Baluja notes that the Financial Times achieves this to great effect on their Instagram account by using concise, tailor-made Stories which link to an expanded version of that report on their website.
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