EIJ13: Best Practices for Journalists on Facebook
“Facebook, the world’s most popular social media site by a 2:1 margin over Twitter, offers journalists both a way to connect with audience members and to gather news.
Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s Journalism Program Manager, ran through some of the ways to use the site at his panel Aug. 25 at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism 2013 convention in Anaheim, California.
Journalists actually have two primary ways of establishing a professional presence on Facebook: Creating a standalone page or enabling Facebook users to follow public posts on their personal pagewhen the New York Times’ website recently went down. Status updates on Facebook max out at about 63,000 characters, according to Lavrusik.
News organizations and journalists including Diane Sawyer have used their Facebook pages to host Q&A sessions with fans by enabling the page administrator’s ability to reply to comments. (Not available on personal pages.)
The site can also be used to track down publicly shared information using the site’s new Graph Search feature.
“You could find school bus drivers in New York, New York,” Lavrusik said.
He also showed off the ability to find publicly shared photos from a site he knew had been affected by Super Storm Sandy and narrowed the photos down by date.
“You can actually find ‘books liked by people who work at NPR,’ which is an interesting one.”
The site has also recently implemented the use of hashtags, similar to those popular on Twitter and Instagram. Although many users aren’t using them, millions of them are, according to Lavrusik. Twitter-style Trending Topics are also on the way.
Similar to the feature on Twitter, Facebook also allows the creation of lists to make following large numbers of people or pages managable.
And ProPublica has used the Facebook Groups feature to build communities around stories they’re working on.
More resources for journalists on Facebook are available at: Facebook.com/journalists, Facebook.com/fbmedia and Facebook.com/facebookpages.
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