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Seems like auto and RSS feeds for social media are pretty hot buttons lately. Earlier this week I wrote about the New York Times' Twitter experiment.
Today, there was a really interesting post on the Washington Post about a panel that was moderated by Facebook journalist program manager Vadim Lavrusik recently.
There were three headlines that came out of the panel's discussion on Facebook:
1. Auto feeds to Facebook could be bring in 2-3 times less engagement than actual posting manually.
2. Facebook "questions" could create more engagement opportunities.
3. Big categories for popular Facebook posts include: Emotion, passion, sports and simple questions.
A few short comments about each of these:
Auto feeds: Just don't do it for Facebook. Every time I see a post that's from a newspaper I have "friended" that's just the headline on Facebook that clearly came from their website, I am pretty inclined to ignore it. When the post has some sort of engagement, asks for my opinion or has some other kind of invitation, I will pay attention. But those posts can't all come one after the other, they need to be spread out throughout the day.
Facebook questions: I haven't seen many newspapers actually try this, but the feature seems to have some nice functionality and I would encourage papers to use the feature next time they want to pose a question to readers. I would not encourage newspapers to use this feature for a poll, because there's no benefit back to the newspaper's website if they're using the Facebook poll tool. But for questions to readers on reaction to a story, the "question" feature is a good use.
Categories: Pretty obvious stuff here and it would be good for papers to walk themselves through these topics before they decide to post a story. Just because a story has a lot of readership in your print product doesn't mean that it will do well with a social media audience. Making sure it hits the emotional or passionate test for readers, is a good test to walk through before deciding to post a story to Facebook.
David Arkin is the Vice President of Content & Audience for GateHouse Media. He oversees all matters related to print and online content, strategy, and online development and support related to the company’s content management system. From 2007-2011 he served as the executive director of the News & Interactive Division for GateHouse Media. Prior to that, he served as the executive editor of Greater Niagara Newspapers (Niagara Falls, N.Y.) and served as the top editor for the Cullman Times (Ala.), the Porterville Recorder (Calif.) and the Huntsville Item (Texas).
