From the conference: Have a social media strategy

BOSTON — It’s not enough now for a news organization or an individual journalist to be active on social media. Strategy is required to effectively use platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

That was the message given to sports editors by panelists Cindy Boren of the Washington Post, Chris Littmann of The Sporting News and Danyelle White of the Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday during two sessions about social media at the 2011 Associated Press Sports Editors Convention.

The digital audience, they said, is already on social media. The good news for journalists is that the audience wants the journalists to be there with them, too.

“Readers want to be involved with our writers,” Boren said. “If (as a reader) you can get a writer who will engage and talk to you, that has value (to the reader).”

Social media use should not be focused entirely on distribution and promotion of stories. Identifying a target audience and delivering specific information to that audience should be the goal. And that information must be followed with engagement to build the audience.

For example, White advises against automating tweets or links as a primary means of communication.   A writer’s audience “wants to hear you, they want to hear your voice. They don’t want a robot,” she said.

The panelists said users of Facebook and Twitter have different audience expectations when it comes to interaction.

“Don’t tweet what you are Facebooking and don’t Facebook what you tweet,” White said. “The tone has to be different between the two. You have to strategize them differently.”

Attention spans in the social media world are also relatively short. The news – and the discussion about it – often plays out in real time. The window to lead that discussion for the journalist can be narrow. “You find out pretty quickly when to walk away from a story,” Boren said.

Littmann said The Sporting News uses Facebook plug-ins on its site that allow readers to comment directly from Facebook onto his site’s stories. This, he said, “enables readers to become advocates for your content.”

“Facebook comments are such a no-brainer for newspapers,” he said, because the audience is already on Facebook and a building a similar robust commenting tool in-house would take a lot of time and money. “Something like Facebook, it’s all right there.”

Other tips:

— Listen to reader comments as they often include good suggestions or story ideas.

— Quality is more important than quantity in terms of a journalists’ followers.

— Keep up to date on trends via sites that specialize in social media such as mediabistro.com.

— Link shorteners such as bit.ly work well on Twitter but full links are much more effective on Facebook.

There’s also another truth about social media, even as we tweet away and add to our collections of “friends.”

“There might be something tomorrow that is more effective, that we like better,” Boren said, “and that might actually make us some money.”