Twitter

Twitter (██)

Twitter is a social network and microblogging platform. Journalists use Twitter
to disseminate links to stories and also as a reporting tool. You can
track stories and tap into online communities on Twitter by searching
for specific hashtags and topics.

Tweetdeck is almost essential to managing your Twitter account, especially
if you have multiple users. Use Tweetdeck to:

  1. Track stories by creating targeted searches using filters
  2. Let others post to your account without sharing your password
  3. Mute specific users or topics on your feed.
  4. View multiple timelines at once.
  5. Schedule tweets to multiple accounts.
Pros Cons
Hashtags for following stories and trends Tweets can get lost in the timeline
You can now insert video (as well as images and links)

Pro tips:
Twiangulate shows you the common followers of two Twitter users, which can be useful for
sourcing\/verification.

Another tool, Storify, lets you embed tweets (and other social content) into stories--great for re-creating timelines of breaking news reports. For more information, see this Guide to Storify for Journalists.

Dataminr is a paid service that teamed up with Twitter to alert journalists to potential breaking news stories, by monitoring public tweets.

Audience

The audiences skews slightly male, in comparison with other social networks, which tend to skew slightly female.

Metrics

Twitter provides data on the following:

  1. Impressions: the number of times your tweet is loaded onto a user's screen
  2. Engagement: number of times users click on a tweet, a link within a tweet, or on your profile
  3. Demographics: data about your followers' interests, location, and gender

You can also use analytics.twitter.com to see how these metrics changed over time.

Privacy

At the account level, users can set their Twitter account to be "protected", which allows users to control who can see their tweets. This option is in Twitter's "Settings & Privacy" page, under "Privacy and safety".

In the "Privacy and safety" section, there are other options that control privacy, including whether tweet locations should be enabled by default, and whether people can find you by phone number or email address.

Security

Supports Two-Factor Authentication: Yes

Go to Twitter's "Settings & Privacy" page. Under "Account", there is an option under Security for "Login verification". Enabling "Verify login requests" gives you an option to use an authenticator/code-generator application, an app password, as well as your mobile phone number. There is also an option to save backup recovery codes. Save the backup recovery codes as they'll come in handy for when you don't have mobile service or you've changed your phone or deleted the authenticator app accidentally.

Case studies

Newsroom

In January 2009, @jkrums made history by tweeting out a photo of a plane that had crashed into New York's Hudson River. After that, Twitter quickly became a breaking news powerhouse. By today's standards, the metrics on this tweet are not great. However, these 140 characters still have the makings of a successful tweet: a photograph and a first-on-the-scene user.

The 2016 Presidential election saw many journalists and reporters live-tweet as the night grew. See The New York Times election coverage here.

Classroom

Professor Ann Cooper’s Audience and Engagement students used a class Twitter
account
to disseminate links to articles on their Tumblr site.
They initially used an automatic service to tweet out links, but found
that tweets written specifically for Twitter outperformed those that
were simply copied from headlines.

Additional resources

Tutorial\/help: Getting started with Twitter

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