During this weeks workshop we looked at social media optimization and mainly, the importance and usefulness of Twitter to Journalists. As I already have a Twitter account, I was comfortable using Twitter and its functions. However, I had to create a new professional twitter account for my profile as a journalist, this is useful as it keeps my professional life separate from my private life which is important as a journalist. In this social media age, twitter is an invaluable tool for the profession as it enables me to build up a following, drive traffic for my work, engage with a specific audience, demonstrate my skills and overall, to create and manage my own personal brand.
To begin with I created a twitter account using my university email and then it took me through the set up where twitter shows you who/how to follow people, and manage and change your account. As this is my professional journalism twitter account I began by following people/organizations that were in the profession, such as top journalists and news organisations, as well as those based locally, in Leeds and Yorkshire, such as Look North, Leeds City Council, and The Yorkshire Evening Post.
Twitter then suggested I follow some well-known people, celebrities, MP’s, so I used the in built tool which orders people to follow by categories such as Entertainment – people like Stephen Fry, Jimmy Car, Jonathon Ross, News – BBC News, John Snow etc. Twitter then enabled me to find people who were in my email contacts list, and as this was my university/professional email, I had lots of useful professional contacts, which enabled me to increase my following/audience. I then used the ‘who to follow’ button to find more people to follow and the ‘browse interests’ link to find people to follow who had similar interests/professional journalism backgrounds in order to increase my professional social media circle.
I then search for lists of people to follow and found that Nina Diamond, a journalists, had created a large number of these public lists, which were interesting and contained a lot of people important to/interested in journalism which I subscribed to.
I then used the link on the workshop page to the article ‘100 twitter accounts every journalism student should follow’ and this gave me a lot more influential and important people to follow on Twitter building up my following to over 100 vital contacts/information providers. I then used the twitter management tool Tweet Deck which enabled me to sort my tweets/people I follow into useful columns such as ‘news’ ‘home’ ‘work’ etc. and helped me manage the content of Twitter online, this was really easy to use and enabled me to pick out important information or useful contacts for my professional social media site.
Finally, I added my professional twitter account to the twitter app on my smartphone which enables me to use and mange my twitter on the go.
Professional portfolio blog 