If you’re a journalism educator or a journalism student, two new studies are worth a look.
The researchers behind “U.S. College Student Media and Twitter: Are Student Media Following Best Practices” surveyed the research and developed a list of five Twitter best practices including:
- Retweeting and mentioning accounts beyond the news organization
- Using hashtags
- Tweeting multimedia, including polls, pictures, graphics and video
- Linking to the publication’s website
- Linking to external content
They looked at 10 university student media accounts over four semesters from August 2015 to May 2017, including newspapers at the University of Miami, Auburn University, Northwestern University and the University of Texas-Austin, and concluded that the outlets were not using these best practices on Twitter.
Overall, the researchers suggested that the publications did very little in the way of retweets, tagging other accounts or linking to external content. In addition, more than half of the tweets failed to use any form of multimedia or any hashtags.
In a separate study, analysis of award-winning college TV stations’ use of Twitter concluded the TV accounts did a little bit better, but the researchers say there is plenty of room for improvement.
“Digital Natives as Budding Journalists: College TV Stations Usage of Twitter” looked at 39 college station accounts in October 2017. All were selected for inclusion after having won at least one award from the Broadcast Education Association in the previous 3 years. Here are the key takeaways:
- The number of followers was related to the frequency of tweets; the more tweets, the more followers
- The stations themselves follow very few accounts – limiting the scope of community reach and interaction
- On average, station tweets were favorited less than three times, retweeted once and received close to zero replies
- About one-third of station tweets used hashtags, about half included links and less than one percent were used for polling, asking questions or crowdsourcing information
The researchers also found that student stations are using Twitter primarily for promotion and breaking news, but those promotions often failed to promote the actual newscast.
On the plus side, the stations seemed quite adept at using multimedia – photos, video or GIFs – with about 70% featuring visual content.
Researchers in both studies concluded that instructors in journalism programs need to do more to be sure their students are aware of the most effective uses of Twitter and other social platforms. And although these studies, like most academic publications, are snapshots of the past, I would suggest that this is still a challenge that needs to be addressed in journalism education.
To read the full studies:
Saks, J., Cruikshank, S.A., and Yanity, M. (2019). “U.S. College Student Media and Twitter: Are Student Media Following Best Practices.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Vol. 74(3), 290-305.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077695818797202
Cozma, R. and Hallaq, T. (2019). “Digital Natives as Budding Journalists: College TV Stations Usage of Twitter.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Vol. 74(3), 306-317.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077695818805899
