I’ve written a lot about Twitter’s value in covering breaking news. But don’t forget to post breaking news, especially photos, to Facebook, too.
Jon Hill, online editor of the Lowell Sun, demonstrated the power of a breaking news photo on Facebook yesterday, almost inadvertently. He was working the early-morning shift when a fire broke out at a popular local pizza parlor.
Jon hustled over to the pizza place and shot a photo. The website was down briefly, so he covered by Twitter and Facebook.
He tweeted some basic information and a photo:
https://twitter.com/#!/LowellSunNews/status/175547295285260288
https://twitter.com/#!/LowellSunNews/status/175550667937685504
And, since he couldn’t publish a story online, he did more than the usual step of just publishing a link to Facebook. He posted the photo and three paragraphs of basic information — the story he had so far — to the Sun’s Facebook page. He got way more engagement than a typical post: 80 comments, 48 shares and 13 likes (with bad news, people are less likely to “like,” thus increasing comments and shares, which show up more prominently in their friends’ news feeds).
This underscores the impact of posting images to Facebook, rather than simply posting links as status updates. If you post a photo, rather than just the thumbnail that goes with a link, it appears bigger in people’s news feeds, and generates more engagement, as my friend Daniel Victor noted in his blog.
The Sun also used Twitter to crowdsource:
https://twitter.com/#!/LowellSunNews/status/175625265202999297
https://twitter.com/#!/Workaholic_SG/status/175643255772418048
John Collins’ story in the Sun quotes some of the Facebook comments.
In a much bigger breaking news story this week, our Digital First Media colleagues at the News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, used Facebook effectively all week in their coverage of the shootings at Chardon High School. Engagement Editor Cheryl Sadler and her colleagues provided a steady stream of updates as the tragic story unfolded.
Beyond the news coverage, one of the thoughtful touches in the News-Herald’s Facebook engagement was to post photos and share photos from other Facebook pages of groups offering their support to Chardon:
In such a tragic story, it’s important to maintain an appropriate tone and to maintain your standards of accuracy, even under the urgency of constant updates. In an email, Cheryl told me:
Anecdotally, several people on Twitter and Facebook told me they thought The News-Herald had handled the shooting and aftermath very responsibly. Other media outlets in the area had published photos that were allegedly the suspected shooter (they were not) and had reported a second student died six hours before he actually did.
I’m proud of the work our News-Herald colleagues did on an important story under difficult circumstances, using both new and traditional tools and skills.
Another great Facebook practice is to specifically invite engagement. Lots of people do this by asking a question. Dan Petty, social media editor of the Denver Post and regional engagement editor for Digital First Media, takes this invitation a step further with a specific call to action. He doesn’t use this practice on every link that he shares, but uses it frequently on links people are likely to have opinions about. Dan invites and guides interaction, asking people to like the update if they agree with a particular point or tell why they don’t agree in the comments.
The example below (the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke story, so he chose a topic people are already talking about) went up on the page about 11 p.m. Mountain time. By about 5 a.m., it had 728 likes, 403 comments and 31 shares.
Don’t just post links to Facebook. Think about the best ways to engage people with your Facebook content. Photos and calls to action are two of the best ways, especially on breaking news stories and those stories that people are talking about.
Being a big FB fan, I found this helpful Steve. I’ve experimented prolifically on my personal page with different styles of posts to gauge what my audience likes. I treat my page pretty much as a newsfeed.
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OK Steve, all that is great, but let me ask a couple things – until folks can truly monetize FB content, shouldn’t our MAIN thrust be to get folks to come back to our Website for the full story?
I bring this up because photos posted ON Facebook don’t, unlike headlines/thumbnails (anyone else had BAD/WRONG thumbnails showing in folks news feeds? FB is working on a bug we found) link back to us.
We’re doing something right, with 3x the ‘likes’ of daily paper, and we definitely do a lot of interacting (asking/answering questions) with our fans there, but … while ‘return on reputation’ is wonderful, it doesn’t obviate the need for return on INVESTMENT. And the time invested in Facebook at present doesn’t bring much revenue our way. In effect, as a colleague says, we are helping Facebook build THEIR value, and financial gains. One doesn’t have to be a backward-looking curmudgeony stick in the mud to feel at least a bit … reluctant about that.
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Barney,
Why does “monetizing” good journalism become important when we are talking about social media, but not when we are discussing coverage of the city council, school board, high school sports or some other aspect of print coverage that might not actually pay for itself but is good journalism?
Fortunately, however, we *can* truly monetize Facebook content, and we are. Facebook advertising and contests are becoming significant sources of revenue for some of our Digital First operations (more all the time, because we are training others in how to do it). So actual engagement on our Facebook pages has growing economic value to us. Beyond that, Facebook is a huge source of traffic to our websites, so it delivers a huge number of impressions for our advertisers, delivering ad revenue on our sites as well.
And you can and should (when possible) post links with photos, as the Pottstown Mercury did with this photo: http://on.fb.me/zEakPC That photo drove traffic back to the Merc website, not just from the Merc’s Facebook page, but from the pages of the people who liked and shared it. The Lowell example I used was a situation where the website was down, so Jon Hill could not post a link.
Effective use of Facebook is not just good engagement and good journalism, but it makes great business sense, too.
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At the Lebanon Daily News, if we have a really good photo with a story, we tend to post the photo, then add the first paragraph and a link. This is especially useful when we cover breaking news (especially crashes, murders/attempted murder scenes, fires). We have way more comments than we would with just a link and a thumbnail photo. But, we make sure to add the link after the first paragraph.
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Excellent point, Andrea! Links should accompany photos when possible. Thanks!
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I guess, Steve, because even corporate bean-counters can see the value of covering what we cover, for both Web and on-air platforms, but when it comes to social media — well, there can be technical limitations (perhaps we’re not on the ‘right platform’ to easily incorporate ads on Facebook yet, I’m on the content side, not as well-versed in the sales side.) Besides, one is coverage areas, the other are platforms to invest in – a bit of apples and oranges. We DO believe on ‘return on reputation,’ trust me – it just has to be more than the cool factor and actually deliver, as you well know. (I wonder how many viewers of the pic on Facebook clicked through vs. thought – well, now, I’ve seen it, I don’t need to go there to see it? That’s the kind of mental exercises I find myself going through at times — page views gained vs. lost – it’s not academic or philosophical, it’s realistic.)
And yes, my supervisors are well aware of how much of our traffic comes from links to our Web stories on Facebook. But it’s more than a tiny fuzzy line between that and spending large amounts of resources on drawing people to or keeping them ON our Facebook page. Until we perhaps get where others have in terms of monetizing the time our viewers/readers spend on their platform, not ours. Facebook has huge benefits, and your tips are great as always. I just… have to keep in mind who I work for and why they are understandably cautious about things, that’s all.
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Barney,
I plan to blog someday about the advertising work my sales colleagues are doing on Facebook. I don’t think many news organizations are pursuing that possibility the way we are (one of many reasons our digital revenue is growing faster.
I don’t think you should think of it in terms of drawing people to your Facebook page or keeping them there. The fact is, they spend loads of time on Facebook and they are doing that whether we are using Facebook effectively or not. I want them to spend some of it with us. We get lots of benefit from that: reputation, engagement, news coverage, news tips, revenue and page views.
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Yep, that’s the argument, er, points I make to those who question just how much investment we should make in Facebook. Folks are there and we need to be where they are. And we too get those benefits, though the $ part… well, as I said, my job is to ride the tide of the daily news and kick out the content as best I can. Very competitive, want to be first (but right, the old UPI Unipresser in me never leaves that part out;-)
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Steve:
Once lowellsun.com was live again, Jon’s initial reporting on FB and Twitter drove major traffic to the site. The initial story and updates topped 6,000 page views for the day, more than double our typical “important” breaking news. Happy we could provide a real-time example during your visit.
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Great article! Reading about the 3 pillars of Edgerank this week. One is weight – how important one post type is against another. Photos are apparently right up there at the top. Looking at the Lowell Sun photo with nearly 50 comments I can’t help thinking that would have pushed up their rank and therefore put that photo in front of a growing number of people in their Fb newsfeeds, extending the Sun’s total reach and therefore indirectly kicking back to the Sun’s bottom line by raising awareness of that media outlet.
Thinking the bean-counters will see some ROI there.
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[…] Shared Facebook engagement tips: Use breaking news photos and calls to action « The Buttry Diary. […]
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Reblogged this on Behind the Press and commented:
I’m catching up a little on my reading, and I enjoyed Steve Buttry’s post on Facebook engagement for breaking news. Worth a read.
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