What’s Your Twitter Strategy?

Common sense says you don’t jump into everything new that comes along with no coherent plan. If you don’t trust common sense, read the excellent new book Groundswell, which emphasizes careful (BUT quick) planning and implementation of social media tactics.

WFPL News went live on twitter about a month ago, after some brief conversations here in the building about experimenting with the channel. The foundation of our service is a rolling feed of news we’re publishing to our site, delivered automatically via rss. But we’ve also tried a few different things: very low key promotion, giving listeners a heads up about local pieces we’re going to broadcast on Morning Edition or All Things Considered; asking questions of our users (on Primary day, “tell us about your voting experience”); and responding to listeners who direct questions to us.

All of these approaches have worked well, from our perspective. We’ve tried hard not to treat the channel as simply another megaphone to reach the masses. We’ve also tried to avoid the trivial.

Our goal has been to speak to our “audience” on twitter with the same voice we use on-air – a voice that’s personal, approachable, authoritative, thoughtful, sometimes humorous. As I’ve noted before, the vast majority of our followers on twitter are from Louisville; they’re already our listeners and many are big fans. Our interaction with them on-air and on twitter changes slightly with the platform, even though the core values remain the same.

So, we’re ready to expand our experiment a little. Up to now, I’ve been the sole “tweeter” for WFPL News, besides the mouse on the wheel in the RSS engine. In the next few days, we’ll expand to three individuals, each of whom will spend a small amount of time each day with twitter.

Our strategy? Glad you asked.

• The auto-feed of news stories continues via rss
• Promotion of local content continues – local features during newsmagazines, promotion of topics on local shows. (by promotion, I mean one mention within an hour before broadcast, not multiple hits)
• Promotion of new web features like Budget Hero.
• We’ll look for 1-2 opportunities each week, initially, to “survey” our audience. We’ll take what I call a “public insight” approach, asking people questions where they can be the expert: what was your experience when you went to vote today? or what’s the price you paid when you last filled the gas tank? as opposed to why have Kentucky graduation rates risen this year? The questions we ask will have a purpose, providing either direct or anecdotal information to our reporters or producers.
• We’ll add a brief update on stories we’re covering for the day each morning.
• We’ll continue to respond to every person who asks a question or makes a comment; we’ll monitor the entire twitter stream regularly, too, so we can see any other conversations about us. (Summize is killer for this; you should go there right after you read this and enter your organization’s name in the box to see what people are saying about you.)
• Develop 1-2 new experiments to test on the channel.

And that, for now, is our strategy. It takes the elements that worked in our first experiment, and makes them standard, more intentional.

Why not more? Because in our “budget” of time and staff, that’s what we can afford at present. Right now, we have about 65 “listeners” on twitter; we can scale up our presence as our audience grows and as staffing allows.

How does this twitter plan fit our Media Strategy? It advances a couple of our goals: increasing interaction with our audience, and increasing the transparency of our organization.

How will we know if it’s working? We’ll look for the following easily measured results: more local followers on twitter; more followers talking directly to us, answering our questions, but also asking us about other stuff (for instance, when will we get the first customer service question on twitter? the first “I gave you money, where’s my coffee mug?”); and growth in visits to our main web sites.

How often will we evaluate and potentially adjust our plan? Weekly. We aren’t going to try this for a year and then produce a Powerpoint.

In summary, our approach to a social media opportunity is not that much different from anything else we do. It involves a plan, an accounting of costs and benefits, goals and regular review.