5 ways news sites can use Twitter lists and widgets

Twitter’s new list function and widgets offer great possibilities for news sites. Here are 5 ways lists and widgets can be used to add extra value to traditional journalism.

• Subscribe to BetaTales by RSS
• Follow me on Twitter

Journalism becomes a real-time job, Mashable writes.  That’s a very useful perspective of the trends we see both in the news business and in social media.  Twitter’s new list functions – with the accompanying widget – give news media a new way of incorporating real-time streams into online journalism.

1. Make lots of lists on your Twitter accounts

This is the basic starting point. News organizations should set up Twitter lists for the content areas they try to build their brand on. What are the 50 best Twitterers in a particular field?  Who would you recommend to your reader?

Make some lists and publish them on your Twitter account. In this way you both give credit to the many quality twitterers that are around as well as guiding your readers to the best Twitter messages.

The New York Times is one of a news organizations which have added a number of lists to its Twitter account. These are also presented on a Twitter page on nytimes.com.  This is an excellent idea for any news site.

Also you should recommend your best journalists to set up lists on their personal Twitter account.

2. Include topical Twitter widgets in articles

After having added lists to your Twitter account the next step is to include some of these into your content on your news site.

This is extremely easy to do. Actually the major task is to make the list in Twitter. Once that is done, including a widget is a piece of cake. You don’t even need a programmer.

Here is how to do it: First go to Twitter’s list widget. Select the list you want to do, put up a title and caption and a workable widget is all ready.

Of course most of you would also prefer to make some adjustments within the options of “preferences”, “appearance”, and “dimensions”. Very well, it might take you a few more minutes. When you are done, just click “Finish & Grab Code”.  You now get the code that you insert into your article where you want the widget to be placed.

The Twitter widget will update automatically when new tweets from the list members are posted.

Here is an example in which I have included my own, not yet complete, online media list:

3. Use Twitter lists and widget at big live events

Twitter widgets are very quick to set up at big live events. In this way you can include tweets about the event as it happens.

This was done very succesfully by several medias in covering the recent Fort Hood shootings.  One great example was Huffington Post.  They made a list of Foot Hood locals who were tweeting from the spot. At the time it added valuable information to the coverage. Afterwards, as you will notice on their page now, the feed has lost its value as the persons now tweet about other issues.

You can choose between two criteria in using Twitter widgets in live coverage of big events:

• Select the people you want to include. This means setting up a list of the people to include and then using the list widget.
• Select a search term to include. This means using a hash tag or search term and then use the search widget.

Which of these you use, depend on the story at hand and your own preferences.

4. Make a moderated and high-quality Twitter feed

The disadvantage of using lists and search terms as basis is that you have no guarantee of the content. Suddenly you get very meaningless crap messages included in the feed. As many editors are wary of including non-moderated content, Twitter also offers another option: The faves widget.

This widget includes all the individual Twitter messages that have been marked as favorites by a particular user.

For news sites this can be used in at least two different ways:

• In covering big events: Have one of your journalists follow all tweets about the news event. The task for the journalist is to mark all individual tweets which are adding real value to the news story as favorites and not just retweeting previous messages. You then use the widget tool to include this journalist’s favorites as a feed in the article, and you suddenly have a moderated high quality feed with the most important tweets about the story.
• In building the brand of your journalists: Some of your writers may have a high profile on a particular topic. Ask them to continuously mark high quality tweets about their subject as favorites – and include this feed into their articles or profile page. The value of this is in displaying these high profile writers’ personal selections.

This way of using Twitter widgets do require dedication to work. But I think it may add real value in some situations.

5. Use Twitter lists to present your own journalists

Taking active part in social media is becoming paramount for journalists. News sites should encourage this and in fact actively promote the presence of their journalists on Twitter and in other social media.

Using Twitter list can be a good way of doing it. Make lists of all your employees on Twitter and display it on your site. In that way you show how proud you are of your journalists and you encourage your readers to interact with them.

……………………………………………………………….

As an end note: I have written several times about how journalists can use Twitter as a tool. Here is a presentation I held for colleagues at Aftenposten in February. It should have been updated, but it might still give some useful hints:

Related posts:

1. 5 simple ways to engage users on a small news site
2. 5 great Twitter tools for journalists
3. 5 great tools to add interactivity to news sites
4. 4 ways of consuming news – and what news sites should do about it

Tagged as: media, news, social media, Twitter