Strategies and Techniques To Grow Your Audience

In chapter six of "Mobile and Social Media Journalism" by Anthony Adornato, he focuses on how journalists can use their social media platforms to engage the audience and build support for their work. He explains that the practice of social media optimization plays a huge role in sharing work with the audience. Since people enjoy getting information throughout the day it can be very effective to share informaiton while the news reporting process is happening to make sure the audience is fully engaged for a longer time. Social media optimization or SMO is a way to increase the viewership of your work by consistenly sharing valuable information that engages the audience.

This SMO stategy when used on a tweet or Facebook post is more likely to lead the readers to share, like, and comment showing how engaged the audience is. This can also lead to the audience paying more attention to the news outlets' website to see more content. Adornato mentions how because so mnay people spend so much time on their phones, they are hevaily involved in social media and that is where they get their first news of the day. Rather than people going directly to websites, people want to see interesting soicial media posts that will then lead them to the website.

One technique to optimize your posts is the use of visuals. This is an easy way to catch the attention of readers since so many people are interested by being able to see what is being written about in the story rather than just reading about it. Adornato mentions that "Tweets that include photos were 35 percent more likely to be retweeted, and those with videos were nearly 30 percent more likely retweeted."

This proves that the audience will gravitate toward photos and videos quicker than just text, but it is also important to provide context of the visuals. Tagging and mentioning is another way to to add valuable informaiton for the audience to see. You can tag locations, people or brands and this can reach so many people if they are interested in that location, person or brand.

Other visuals like tagging/mentions, hashtags and links are a good way to involve the audience and the people who wrote the story or is mentioned in it. Using links is a good way to lead the readers to the main source of the news. He mentions how it is important to write stories knowing people will be reading them on their phones, so the content must be easy to understand and to the point.

In the second part of the chapter Adornato focuses on measuring the success of social media activity by using analytics. Newsrooms have used these analytics to figure out ways to continue to increase the viewership of their content. From these analytics insights have been gained including user experience, editorial decisions, and employee evaluations. This has been an advantage for many newsrooms.

At the same time there are also disadvantages to using these analytics also. Many times journalists are under a lot of pressure to put out stories so they will post somehting that is based on entertainment rather than writing a story of value. Another negative is the use of clickbait, which is where the story headline is amazing or misleading and this will cause people to click on it but the content of the story leaves out lots of information. Using clickbait to entice the audience to click on the story will hurt a journalist's credibility. All the platforms like Twitter, Facebook and websites have analytical tools to see people's activity on your pages. These tools help journalists to understand what they need ot do less or more of to better their content.

For the checklist section of this chapter, I only have a personal Facebook page and I don't usually post so the majority of the content is made up of photos. For Twitter, I just made my account in September so I am yet to fully engage myself with the platform.