More and more preteens are joining their older siblings on the social media photo sharing site Instagram. Are parents in your community worried?

ESPN and Twitter Inc. have announced that the social network will show ESPN highlight clips of major sporting events in the Twitter feed, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

There's certain things you can do to get engagement on Facebook, and a call to action is one of the best.

Newspapers that are getting more active on Facebook and Twitter can benefit from doing something different in print. Newspapers in our two Design Houses recently updated the format for Your News to incorporate social media content and to promote community bloggers.

Before Monday, if you wanted to reply to a Facebook commenter, you had to post a new comment and mention them by name so they knew you were "talking" to them. With a change launched this week, now you can reply directly to a commenter.

You thought no one was looking when you posted that snarky comment on a company's Facebook page. For the more savvy in the business world, they're not only looking, they're responding. With a hilarious video. That takes you to task.

RebelMouse, a website that launched last year, is a good tool for newspapers and journalists posting to various social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. I’ve been playing around with it and want to let you know about some things I’ve learned so you can check it out, too.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, you could have watched an entire Vine video, start to stop, and likely taken something away from it, even in its brevity.

SJ-R's Chris Young has wildlife covered for GateHouse papers in Illinois.

Karen List is the director of the University of Massachusetts Journalism Program and has been a professor there for almost 25 years. She teaches History of American Journalism, Journalism & Law and Journalism Ethics. Through the years, her ethics class has come to include discussions about journalistic ethics on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. She shares some of her thoughts on the topic with her former student, Nicole Simmons, the regional digital editor for GateHouse Media New England.

Meghan Kelly, digital editor for the MetroWest Daily News, is experimenting with the photo-sharing site Instagram and the micro-blogging platform Tumblr to see how these new social media tools can work for her news organization. We've asked her some questions about her efforts.

When reporters ask me how their Twitter account should differ from the newspaper’s, I always point to MetroWest Daily News cops and courts reporter Norman Miller as an example of a reporter using Twitter the right way.  

Facebook recently announced a new way to search for information through a program it's testing with a limited audience called Graph Search. If it's rolled out to everyone, it could be a great tool for journalists, who can tap in to what Facebook calls a Rolodex (remember those?) of 1 billion potential sources. Here are five ways you will be able to use the new Facebook Graph search as one more tool in your news-gathering belt.

Mallary Jean Tenore, managing editor of Poynter.org, shared 5 social media tools to enhance digital storytelling in a webinar we recently hosted. Here are five takeaways from that webinar, along with a link to download the webinar.

Several major news organizations have told their news staffs not to blindly Tweet on Election Day, which is today. The Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal both sent memos to staff members reminding their folks that even re-tweeting election news can create the appearance of bias. The AP memo. The WSJ memo.

The rapid growth of social media website Pinterest caught the attention of the GateHouse Media News & Interactive Division in late spring, when the site grew to the fourth largest social media website, in addition to having the most rapid growth of any social media website. So, from June 1 to August 31, 2012, the News & Interactive Division worked with the top ten GateHouse papers in a study to understand how and if getting on the social media website Pinterest would benefit our papers.

Our new Design Houses are on Facebook and Twitter. Like us, follow us, share us, retweet us! Then you can keep up with the latest news as we consolidate newspaper editing and design work in Framingham, Mass., and Rockford, Ill.

We learned in 2008 the importance of social media to elections, especially for the presidential race. This year, there are even more social media outlets than we had four years ago. Ways to use the power of these tools to cover your local and national elections:

For a little over a year, the subdivision I live in has had a Facebook page and from time to time residents would post questions, seeking advice on things like lawn care and home owner association fees.

I didn't pay much attention to it until about a month ago. That's when a controversial school boundary issue bubbled up in my community. And I actually learned about the issue through my subdivision's Facebook page.

Residents started posting information about the possibility that elementary school kids may potentially have to attend a new school, about five miles from our subdivision, not the school they currently attend, which is located about one mile from us.

We've talked about "engagment" with your fans on Facebook on several webinars and in Inner Circle training. For the Littleton (MA) Independent, that paid off in a big way.