Brittney Gilbert is someone you need to be following and listening to what she says.
There are tons of reasons. She is living about what most people are pontificating.
And she has some sage advice for newsrooms utilizing Twitter.
This is just a few things that she is telling you should and (in my opinion) will work.
- to link, sparingly – Go ahead, link to yourself. You want traffic, and there is no shame in that. Making your Twitter feed a link-stream only is poor form, but there is nothing wrong with linking to your work, provided that is not all you do
- to entertain - If people don’t enjoy reading, they will quickly stop doing so. Make your Twitter updates engaging. Don’t underestimate the allure of a well-crafted tweet. Jazz it up.
- to humanize – This is highly important. Your news organization is viewed as a gargantuan, soulless corporate entity. Trust. Take this time to let the awesome humans who work in your newsroom share a little of themselves. Mention that the leftover pizza from the meeting in the morning was snagged in under 45 seconds. Mention that it is the anchor’s birthday. A little humanity makes people invested in what you’re pedaling.
- to find story ideas - They are crawling all over Twitter. Ignore them at your peril.
- to search in real time – Perhaps the most important of the points, Twitter Search is where I see Twitter finally monetizing (barf) their product. When a Muni train collided with an 18-wheeler in SF Twitter had a pic of the accident in under 10 minutes. You can’t get Google to rank items that fast, but Twitter can. That earthquake in the Bay Area Monday? All your “man on the street” reactions were coming in at a rapid fire pace.
You can read the rest at her personal blog, Sparkwood and 21.
As I said, BG gets it because she has walked through each phase of blogging, social media and news as the Internet evolves.
Incidentally, you can follow NewsTechZilla on Twitter as well.
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