How to Use Facebook — for Journalists

How to use Facebook and its social media offshoots, particularly Instagram, isn’t all that different for journalists than how to do, well, journalism. Many of the same tenets hold between the practice of journalism and the promoting and communicating of it. That’s a takeaway from an event Monday night at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and organized by its DC Pro Chapter.

Getting and keeping attention is important on this (as all) mediums, the event was told by Kerwin Speight, a media and leadership consultant retained by SPJ for this training in various locations. Hence what Speight called the three-second rule. When posting to Facebook and Instagram, that’s all the time you have before someone decides to ‘swipe and keep moving,’ he said. ‘There is so much other stuff.’ Choose an ‘eye catching photo or video’ was among such advice.

An overview of the discussion:

Most important, one needs a coherent strategy before taking to social media to tout one’s good journalism. One needs a plan, Speight emphasized. This can involve knowing your audience, and thinking about what subject or topic you’re focusing on.

Facebook groups are one way to hold such a topic-oriented audience. Major media organizations have been using subject-area newsletters to funnel readers to group pages, Speight said, citing the New York Times, Vox and others. The Times’ “paying till it hurts” series on healthcare under ‘Obamacare’ is one such example. Medical doctor and Times journalist Elizabeth Rosenthal, a writer of this series, advocates such an approach.

Facebook is good for searching, too. Just like a journalist would do for an online search engine, let alone just about any other collection of works, Speight advised using not just keywords but also dates and places and people and more. The more specific information, the more targeted your search result, it seems.

Don’t forget Instagram. Posts there tend to get double to triple the interactions as the same content posted to Facebook, according to figures Speight discussed. Because Instagram is mostly pictures and video, it’s ‘a great way to capitalize’ on such content, the event was told.

Privacy came up, too, with a number of questions related to that. One question from Twitter was how a journalist can use a newsroom, not personal account, when it comes to being able to be searched. Speight replied that many newsrooms offer such a generic account for this purpose.

Another audience question related to privacy was about how to keep one’s personal and pro personas separate on Facebook. Consider creating a page for oneself or a second user with using one’s middle name was a suggestion from the trainer. Regardless, he said to be prepared for some bleed over between a personal and professional presence on the web platform.

Speight also led a self-executed demo of how to post video to Facebook. And he showed the audience of journalists and journalism students how to use CrowdTangle to post stories. As long as the person doing the posting owns the rights to that content, this feature will provide a wealth of statistics, he said.

One thing this session didn’t cover was Facebook’s policies on say advertiser identification or targeting of audiences. For questions on that, Speight suggested journalists email the company’s PR people: press@fb.com. He noted that such privacy issues continued to be in the news on Monday. Witness the Times’ story on Facebook letting device makers and others get direct access to user data.

Here’s a summary of what Speight discussed. This is kind of like the journalism hierarchy/pyramid, if it were a 1, 2, 3-step chart instead: