How many news organizations can identify with today’s Dilbert strip? In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of corporate media companies that want to reap the benefits of social media without allowing employees to appropriately use the tools. Funny, but all to close to home for some. (Strip is after jump due to stupid blog formatting)
Category: Social Media Page 4 of 7
Finds and facts about using social media in journalism.
I hate these long gaps between posts as much as you do. I’ve been busy over at TBD, but I haven’t forgotten about the old ZJ.
I have a couple of other posts in the works, but a bit of a recap. Last Wednesday, Sept. 1, was a big day for TBD – and for me personally. When a gunman burst into the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring and took three hostages, we sprang into action and, in turn, were propelled into the spotlight for the first time since our launch.
It was my first real breaking news situation since starting at TBD – and the first I’ve ever experienced in a TV newsroom. Within minutes of hearing from a TV reporter’s wife (who works at the Discovery site) about the situation, we had a helicopter and live reporting on-scene. You don’t get helicopters at the Cincinnati Enquirer, so that was pretty mind-blowing.
Within minutes we were getting in photos and eyewitness reports from Twitter. We were streaming video online before anyone else – heck, it was even used on other news sites in our area. As things were confirmed, I was able to tweet them out ASAP. I had a lot of back-and-forth communication going on with our staff, some of our blogger partners on-scene and other eyewitnesses on Twitter (a few we even got to talk live on-air). In short, it was an amazing time to be behind the Tweetdeck.
We sent 21 tweets on the situation that day. According to the Bivings Report, we were mentioned/re-tweeted 334 times. We got more than 400 new followers, a boost in web traffic – and a lot of wonderful praise from our audience and peers. My favorite tweet was from Justin Karp:
@TBD is having their CNN/Gulf War moment right now. They’re dominating coverage right now. Kudos.
All that praise and warm fuzzies aside – it proved once again that monitoring and using Twitter in breaking news is increasingly important for any news operation. Twitter “broke the story”, we all know that – and for better or worse it owned the coverage in a lot of ways. We in the news media can only engage the best and stream the rest when something like this happens in such rapid-fire succession. It was a day of lessons for us and every media outlet, I’m sure.
In the days afterward, I was working with others to determine who wrote that first tweet from the building and when it was sent, not only to give them credit, but also to see just how far behind we were. We had our first tweet out at 1:33 pm, about 20 minutes after the first tweet we found. We can do better – and next time we will.
It’s the end of our first week on business at TBD and, admittedly, I’m completely exhausted. We all are.
It felt like a good first week for us – we got a lot of reviews, positive and negative, from other media sites and blogs. Despite the bugs and occasional complaints, we did have the opportunity to come out of the gates with a few engagement experiments you might find helpful at your own news orgs.
Open discussion on launch day
We had an open Cover it Live chat on the Community Blog from 9-4 on launch day. TBD Community hosts Lisa Rowan, Jeff Sonderman, Daniel Victor and Nathasha Lim took questions, complaints and bug reports from site visitors in an open and honest fashion. They didn’t just address the positive, they also did what they could to assuage the fears of those missing the former websites for WJLA and News Channel 8, now replaced by TBD.com.
Crowdsourcing for breaking news photos
On Thursday, the Washington, D.C. area woke up to severe thunderstorms, high winds, flooding streets – and a lot of damage. While our one full-time photographer was able to get a lot of art, we knew we couldn’t be everywhere. The call was sounded for photos on Twitter and on the site – and readers responded with submissions on-site and via Twitpic.
We ended up repeating this process later in the day with a reported electrical fire near the District’s business center. I first saw reports and Twitpics of the fire on a random Twitter search for “Fire near: Washington DC”. We quickly reached out on Twitter for permission to use the photos – and we were off to the races. It was great to get such good response out of the gate.
Working with bloggers on breaking news
Around 1:30 pm Tuesday, I looked over one of my series of Twitter searches and found a tweet reporting an alleged hit-and-run by a Metrobus in Arlington, Va. I contacted the guy, Matt, via reply and asked him if he’d talk to our Arlington reporter, Rebecca Cooper. He agreed.
At 2:12, network partner site Unsuck DC Metro, who the original tweet was directed toward, had a post up with the tip.
Another partner site, ARLNow, had a story with photos and quotes from the man involved in the accident at 3:07. TBD had a story with the tipster’s report and ARLNow’s report up before 4 p.m, approximately four hours before The Washington Post or WTOP (and a hat tip to the Post for promoting the great efforts of ARLNow).
Without the tip provided by Twitter and the hustle by the bloggers in our community network, there’s no way we could have had such a story so fast. Who says bloggers aren’t journalists? Not us.
Tapping into the crowd for political coverage
Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag
On Wednesday, TBD TV’s Newstalk program had the Democratic candidates for D.C. mayor on the program for a debate. In the hours before the 10 a.m. debate, we asked readers to submit their questions for the candidates via hashtag on Twitter. The response was more than we could fit on the program, which was great (see right).
When the debate went live on TV and online, fact-checking reporter Kevin Robillard had a live Cover it Live chat where readers could chime in with comments, ask questions and suggest facts to be checked as the candidates said them on the air.
The debate got a lot of traction on Twitter and on the chat. Kevin had some great material for The Facts Machine, which is a TBD blog dedicated to backing up or refuting questionable facts.
We hope to do a lot more projects like this in the future. Not bad for the third day out.
Once upon a time, Google Wave was the next big thing. I had high hopes for it’s use in news – but it was not to be.
Google announced Wednesday that it will stop development on the Wave project, citing a lack of user adoption. They will leave the site up through the end of the year, but probably not long after.
What went wrong? Simple: Wave started out buggy, slow and difficult to understand – and it never got better. It also never really seemed to find it’s place in the daily rituals of regular people – which was a critical problem.
Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine has a great piece about what went wrong with Wave. In short: It’s one thing for developers to love and use this product – for it to really succeed, it had to be adopted by some regular people.
On a personal level, I used Wave for a couple of months – but I always had to think, “Oh, I think I’ll go check Wave.” It didn’t make it’s way into my routines, it didn’t show up in my Gmail and it didn’t become part of my life. We forgot one another. I imagine this was the case for many people.
Even with Wave’s demise, Google certainly isn’t down or out in the world of social networking – nor should they be. Several tech watchers noted Google’s allusions to Wave-like features showing up in future projects – possibly indicating the development of Google’s rumored social networking site Google Me, which would take on Facebook head-on.
Mashable‘s Pete Cashmore is dubious about Google’s future in the social arena. He notes:
As Facebook builds a user base of more than 500 million people, it also stockpiles the personal information required to provide more comprehensive ad targeting — and a more personalized search engine — than Google could ever hope to engineer through algorithms alone.
Google Me seems to be growing past mere rumor and speculation at this point with the mercy-killing of Wave and several key acquisitions. Social media fans and developers are keeping a close eye on this project – and wondering if this time Google will have the right recipe to take their piece of the social media pie.
It can be tough to be a new brand these days. Locking down namespace online is a huge part of a brand build – but much like potential mates, all the good ones seem to be taken.
We ran into that when we started building the brand for the soon-to-launch TBD. It’s a popular acronym, as everyone knows, so securing that namespace in social media was quite challenging. Though we’ve been tweeting for nearly two months as @TBDDC, this week we finally acquired @TBD. This is how it went down.
We wanted @TBD from the start, but it was occupied by a private, dormant account with zeroes across the board – no followers, no follows and no tweets.
Obviously, the first step in this scenario is to try to contact the handle owner. From my own account, I requested to follow this user to see if they were checking their notifications. Either they weren’t checking or I was rejected, because I never heard back.
I also sent the user a couple of @ replies to see if they were even checking those. No response.
It was time to turn to Twitter.
When you want to take this next step, it’s important to note Twitter’s policies in relation to your situation.
The policies are different depending on whether or not the account is active, whether the user is actively impersonating your brand and whether or not you have a registered trademark on your name.
If someone is actively using the handle you want in accordance with the rules, there’s little Twitter can do, even if you have a trademark on the name.
From Twitter:
Where there is a clear intent to mislead others through the unauthorized use of a trademark, Twitter will suspend the account and notify the account holder.
When an account appears to be confusing users, but is not purposefully passing itself off as the brand/company/product, the account holder will be notified and given an opportunity to clear up any potential confusion, per the guidelines listed below.
Contacting the user directly is really your only hope to getting the name in this instance.
If you want to acquire the handle of an inactive account, as we did, it really helps to have a registered trademark on the name. We did not have our trademark registration info right away, but I still submitted a ticket request to have the name released.
Once we got our trademark registration information, I filed another ticket, this time under the trademark policy. This time I filled out the required trademark info. To do this, our Twitter account had to be linked to an email address from our domain (an important thing to note if you have a business or blog without a URL yet). This was the final thing that pushed it over the top and got us @TBD.
If you don’t have a trademark registration, you may still have a chance, though note this important point in Twitter’s inactive username policy:
We are currently working to release all inactive usernames in bulk, but we do not have a set time frame for when this will take place. If a username you would like has been claimed by an account that seems inactive, you should consider selecting an available variation for your use on Twitter.
Even so, it wouldn’t hurt to submit a ticket request from your account to report the inactive name.
When and if you get a username opened up, you can easily change your Twitter handle to the new one without affecting your followers, lists or settings. You can do this from the Account tab of your account Settings. In our case, Twitter rolled @TBDDC over to @TBD for us.
When you change your Twitter handle, you have to be vocal about the change. If you can do it before the changeover, tell your followers what’s coming. After the change, they’ll receive your tweets at the new handle, but they may not realize the difference and may send replies and DMs to your old handle. Tweet about the change and encourage retweets. It might not hurt to briefly re-secure your old handle and put up a message there about the new account.
Note: If you get a second handle for this purpose, be good citizen and don’t name-squat. After a couple of weeks or so, if you aren’t going to use this account for something else, delete it and re-open the name.
But even if you don’t get the handle you want, you shouldn’t let it stop you from jumping into social media. It wasn’t a deterrent for TBD – we were able to build a lot of buzz on @TBDDC before we got the new name (and we were prepared to have that name be permanent).
If you can’t get the username of your brand, think of a way to make your own version. Shorten it, add an adjective or adverb, tack on a location or do something entirely out-of-the-box. It really isn’t all in a name. It all depends on how you use the medium and how well you can promote it elsewhere.
Aside from all the fun marketing options, Foursquare can be very valuable for reporters, bloggers and other news organizations. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Find a source with ties to a specific location
When you go to a venue’s page on Foursquare, you can see who has recently checked in there and who is there the most often (aka The Mayor). Say a popular local eatery recently closed – find a frequent customer to interview for the story.
2. Find a source on the scene – fast
In addition to the venue page, you can use Twitter’s search to see publicly posted Foursquare check-ins in near real-time. Go to search.twitter.com and enter 4.sq AND your keyword to see who’s there right now.
3. See where your contacts are –and where they regularly go
Follow your beat contacts and sources on Foursquare and be opened up to their every move. When a Foursquare contact checks in, you can see where they are or have been under Friends.
4. Alert people as to news at a location
Check in where news is happening and leave a shout message as to what’s happening. You may also want to add a link to a story or your Twitter feed for those wanting more info. If you aren’t at the location, but want people there to see the news item, you can cheat (just this once!) and use m.foursquare.com to leave your shout. Note: People have to be friends with you to see this info.
5. Use your expertise (and drive traffic to your stuff) with tips
Leave a tip based on your knowledge of a venue, neighborhood, landmark or intersection. If you have it, leave a link to a blog post or story you’ve written about it for more info. (Note: Don’t just use any old post, try to make it actually useful).
More: See what the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bravo are doing on this front.
6. Learn about a location
The tips left behind at venues can be very useful for us as both patrons and profilers. They tell you what to order, what to avoid and what to expect when going there. It may or may not be great for reporting, but it helps when living (trust me).
7. See where the people are
On your Foursquare mobile app, you can see what locations near you have the most check-ins right now. Visiting a site like Social Great can also help you see these trends.
8. Show Where You Go
You can use a Foursquare account to show where you are or where you’ve been in your area, something that could really be of use to neighborhood reporters or bloggers in particular. You can display these on your blog or Facebook page using a variety of available apps.
Recommended Links
- 21 Geolocation Case Studies: Great examples of how brands, media outlets and other sites have used Foursquare, Gowalla and other geolocation applications
- 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare: Mashable offers up suggestions for how reporters and news orgs might use Foursquare
- 4squareoffers.com: Foursquare deals for mayors and check-ins on a simple map
- Big Maps: See tips and check-ins as they happen on a Bing map
- Fourwhere.com: Venues and tips from Foursquare users on a map
- SocialGreat.com: Trending locations (only in some cities)
Foursquare and other location-based services hold tremendous opportunity for media companies willing to get on board with an unconventional approach to interaction while it is still in its infancy. Following is a very basic overview of these services, including a glossary and tips for those who may not be familiar with these tools.
What are location-based services?
These are any programs or applications that take advantage of the mobile web and GPS capabilities of certain mobile phones to create an interaction based on a user’s location.
An Overview of What’s Out There
Foursquare is a popular location-based app that combines elements of Twitter, city guides and computer games. Users “check-in” to locations via a mobile app, alerting their friends as to their whereabouts and earning points, badges and special offers from local businesses.
Gowalla is the next closest competitor, though it operates on a slightly different system. Here’s an excellent comparison. Gowalla’s best asset is its “trips” features, which lay out a group of destinations in a particular city for someone to trace the path. This has huge potential for media and the travel industry.
Twitter added geolocation to its tremendously popular service earlier this year – and in mid-June they unveiled Twitter Places, which has venues targeted by geolocation that users can append to tweets. One leg up on the others is a feature where users can explore recent tweets and other venues in their Places location.
Keep an eye on Twitter in this space – they have a lot more users than all the others combined, which could really push geolocation services further into the mainstream.
You can also never leave Facebook out of the equation. They are constantly developing new features to take on other social media – and word is they’ll be launching their own location-based features this summer.
There’s also MyTown, which isn’t as widely used, but has a unique focus on the gaming aspect of these apps. MyTown has a touch of Sim City and Monopoly in its gameplay, allowing users to accumulate and spend virtual cash to buy and rent property.
Early forerunners to these apps are Loopt and Brightkite, which were mobile apps/sites for early adopters of smartphones to find one another. Problem was – there weren’t all that many of us to make it very interesting. Loopt has recently added new features to become more focused on recommendations. Brightkite has, for the most part, remained without a focus on gaming, existing for more of a bare-bones check-in to alert friends as to your location.
Glossary of Common Terms
Check-in: This is where you tell the app where you are. You can check-in from just about any kind of venue – hotels, restaurants, stores, attractions, intersections, etc.
Shout: A tweet-esque message accompanying a check-in on Foursquare (though Gowalla offers something similar). This can be sent out to Facebook and Twitter if you have it set up that way.
Tip: User-added advice that pops up when you check in to a venue on Foursquare. This is what makes Foursquare useful, so tip often!
To-do: Like a tip, but more of a note to oneself.
Badges or Pins: Certain patterns of check-ins can lead to a user earning these virtual rewards.
Trips: Gowalla offers a collection of venues one can check into on an organized tour of a city. You can create these yourself or take public trips.
Mayorships: Some businesses offer exclusive offers for the user who has checked in to their location the most on Foursquare – aka The Mayor.
Do’s and Don’ts of Location-Based Services
Don’t check in at home – not only is it cheating, but it can be dangerous. Don’t check it at someone else’s house without permission and really, don’t check in anywhere you think it might not be wise to share (like where your kids go to school, for instance).
Don’t broadcast your location to Twitter or Facebook unless it’s actually interesting. At least include a shout or message if you intend to share your location beyond the service.
Don’t cheat. Foursquare is a game people take seriously, so don’t check in as you’re walking/driving by a place or otherwise stack your stats.
Note: That said, you can go to m.foursquare.com to leave shouts if you aren’t on the scene but want to update users as to what’s happening at a location. This is good for breaking news when you aren’t on location.
Do know that it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like people knowing where you are, don’t use it. If the only places you regularly go are your home and workplace, Foursquare isn’t made for you (and that’s OK).
Upcoming: Using Foursquare in journalism
Thanks to Facebook’s near-constant changes to their privacy settings, it’s tough to keep documentation on them up to date. In preparation for staff training here at TBD, I’ve completely overhauled these resources for anyone wishing to use Facebook for their professional journalism uses as well as their personal lives. I hope you’ll find these useful.
Intro to Facebook for journalists (and any professionals): A guide that explains the basics of Facebook with a glossary or terms and a look at demographics.
Setting up an All-Purpose Facebook Account: Setting up a Facebook page you can easily use for personal and professional contacts.
Sharing Your Content on Facebook: Using your newsfeed to promote content, blogs and social media accounts.
More resources on Facebook you should check out:
- Search Facebook status updates at Openbook or OpenFacebookSearch
- Mashable’s Facebook Guide for Journalists: An excellent look at using Facebook for finding leads, effective sourcing, ethical issues and more.
- Facebook Demographics and Statistics, 2009-2010 (iStrategy Labs)
- Ways to get Facebookers to Read Your Story
Personally, I’m not a big fan of social media policies. While I recognize a lot of companies need to have these policies in place to cover their butts in court, I generally frown upon anything that gives journalists any excuse to not communicate openly with sources and/or readers via social media.
So this isn’t a social media policy. It isn’t sanctioned by any bosses or lawyers or governing bodies – and I think it’s just right. Take that for what you will.
10 Social Media Guidelines to Live By
- Follow the Golden Rule with social media content. Don’t use anyone’s stuff without getting permission and giving credit – you’d want that, right?
- As with anything else, make sure you verify news from social media before running with it (or even re-tweeting it). Think of social media as a tip generator, not a reporter.
- Make corrections quickly – and don’t try to hide them. Your Twitter/Facebook followers will notice – and they will quickly forgive mistakes so long as you are transparent.
- If you don’t know something, just say so. It’s OK – and someone may have the answer you need.
- Always remember: The Internet is public and permanent. Everything you say – even what you think is private – could be found and documented. Act accordingly.
- Furthermore, if you wouldn’t say it on air or in a story, don’t say it at all.
- You don’t have to get special social media accounts just for work. Many journalists (myself included) use one account to span both worlds. Not everyone is comfortable with that, so it’s your call.
- Even if you have separate social media accounts for work, keep your profession in mind. To the law (and to readers and sources) you are always a journalist in everything you do.
- Friending, liking and following may sound like chummy words, but these are things you need to do to get info from sources on social media. If you think it might make you look biased, put a notation on your page/bio that says why you do it.
- Immediacy is part of the fun and news value of social media, but no post is so urgent as to not need a second look. Read and think before you post.
Despite its reputation, Twitter is not just to tell people what you had for breakfast. Journalists willing to learn the tool well can also use Twitter to:
- Monitor the activities and interactions of people you cover
- Crowdsource stories by asking your followers for ideas or info
- Quickly find people who witnessed or experienced an event
- See what people are talking about right now
- Live report from the scene of a news event
- Drive traffic to your content
So, how do you do that? Tweets you might send:
- If you want info, say so. Simply tweet: “Trying to find someone who…” or “Anyone out there know…” Ask for re-tweets.
- Tweet out links to your work or links to other content you find funny, interesting or relevant to your beat that you’d like to pass on.
- Keep readers abreast of what you’re working on.
- Share what you are doing or where you are only if you think the people reading will find it interesting. Maybe you’re on location for a notable meeting or event or meeting with someone interesting.
- If you are at a location or event where news is developing, tweet out the details. Notable quotes, questions asked, who’s there, what’s happening. Note: If you are going to “live tweet” a planned event, it’s a good idea to warn your followers ahead of time.
- Reply to the people who talk to you on Twitter – and respond to their tweets if they say something interesting on their account. You don’t have to reply to everyone if you get a lot of incoming tweets, but if they ask a question, be sure to answer it.
- Publicly ask questions of specific sources or readers if you know their Twitter names.
- Share notable tweets from those you follow by re-tweeting.
- Tweet as if you were talking to a friend (and not like a TV promo or a robot). People want to follow you on Twitter not only for info, but also to “get” you as a person, so some degree of breeziness is encouraged.
Sharing Links
Twitter is an ideal place not only to share links to your work, but also what you’re reading, info related to your beat and work you admire from others.
- Always shorten your links using a link shortening service like that at tinyurl.com or bit.ly.
- Preface shared links with a headline or some introduction. Ex: Interesting take on net neutrality: http://bit.ly/khkhfdkkh
- If you see a tweet or link you liked, re-tweet rather than rewrite. It’s nice.
Other Posts on Twitter
Twitter Signup and Account Setup
Intro to Twitter for Journalists (6/2010)
Data Mining Twitter for reporting (6/2010)
Need-to-Know Twitter Tips for Journalists (6/2010)
My own collection of suggested links about Twitter and social media for journalists is on Delicious.
It’s downright amazing what you can find out from Twitter’s formidable search engine. Here’s just some of what you can do with Twitter’s publicly available feeds:
• See what’s happening on your beat: Basic, but no less awesome. Follow the Twitter feeds of any agencies, officials and other contacts on your beat.
• Find people on the scene or read reactions to events: Twitter has an excellent built-in search engine that allows you to search by keywords, location, date and more. It’s a gold mine to the journo who takes the time to search correctly.
More: Even if you aren’t searching for a particular topic, a Twitter search is a great way to do a fishing expedition for events (try searching for crash, fire, hurt, etc.). Also be sure to try common misspellings in the keyword search.
• Search for someone at a particular place: Use the Twitter search with Foursquare or Gowalla to find an eyewitness in a particular location at the time news occurred. Search for the name of the location or keyword with added operators for 4sq or gowal.la. Like this.
• See what topics are trending nationally and locally: Your home page on Twitter will show you what’s trending right now either network wide or by your location. Also check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). For instance, check out this local trendsmap data to see what topics keep coming to the top of Twitter in the DC area right now.
• See tweets on a map: Check out Bing’s Twitter and Foursquare maps to see searchable tweets and check-ins on a map. For a new map, go to bing.com/maps/explore and select the map app you want.
• Watch real-time reaction: Twitterfall is a great site for watching developing reactions and trends. Watch one of the trending topics or search for keywords to see them “fall” in as they’re tweeted.
• Get a photo from the scene: There are lots of sites that allow you to search Twitter photos, but plugging twitpic OR yfrog OR flickr OR tweetphoto (plus a location or keyword) into Twitter Search will also turn up a lot of pictures. See one you’d like to use? Be sure to ask.
The sites here are just the tip of the iceberg – there are thousands more apps out there using this network to display useful trends and info.
Related Info:
Need to Know Twitter Tips for Journalists (6/4/10)
Excellent recommended post on the subject from Web Up The Newsroom.
As we’re hiring new staff members for every position from web producers to listings editors and transit reporters, a lot of my job at TBD will be devoted to bringing all those new hires – plus some of our existing staff from News Channel 8 and WJLA – up to speed on social media tools and practices.
I don’t think it’ll spoil anything to say we plan to use social media quite a bit in every aspect of TBD, so that training will be very important both before launch and as we go into the future and technology changes. Some of our staff, I imagine, will already have a rich background in social media use, while others may not be as comfortable just yet – so many levels of training will be vital.
I’m in the process of officially updating all of my documentation, so I’m in full resource re-evaluation mode. As I post on training plans, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing and offer your good examples of social media use you think we should take to heart.
Today – Twitter!
So most of us know now that Twitter is a rich way for reporters to connect with sources and readers as well as build their own brands. In addition to the basics of Twitter use, new users need to know how to find the right journalists, sources and locals to follow, using/understanding hashtags and how they can use Twitter for better reporting. I usually point newb reporters to the work of tweeting reporters on Muckrack and use the live presser tweets from @theHyperFix as a good example of live-tweeting.
There are a million great resources on using Twitter. I’ve collected quite a few I like to use.
The next logical step in Twitter training is using it’s vast amount of data to find information, track trends and find sources for stories. Sites like BackTweets, TweetGrid and Twitter’s own pretty formidable search engine can really help a journalist looking for people tweeting about [insert subject here] in their area and beyond.
Web Up The Newsroom recently had a great post about using Twitter search tools in reporting and sourcing that I think may be the best description of I’ve seen geared toward reporters.
Aside from the data search, Twitter’s geolocation data makes it easy to watch trends and tweets as they happen on a map – which is great if, say, news just broke in a certain area and you want to see what’s happening there from afar. I particularly like Bing’s Twitter maps (which can turn into quite a timesuck if you let it). SocialGreat is also nice if you just want to see what places seem to be trending across all the geolocation platforms.
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If you’d rather see a list than a map of trending local topics, you could check your Twitter home page – or, better yet – check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). A lot of the time, these are silly chain letter hashtags or obvious news (like how Gulf and Oil are trending here right now), but sometimes you can see reaction to real-time events pop up in these trend searches (check it out right after a celebrity death or during a big sporting event to see what I mean). Trendsmap also has a great visualizer.
If you know what keyword you’d like to track over a course of time, Trendistic has a decent trend graphing application.
Aside from Twitter, there’s obviously a lot of other social media we’ll want to use in our day-to-day operations…but that’s for another post, my friends.
In the meantime, what are your favorite tips and tricks, apps or uses for Twitter I should be sure to pass on as we start training?