Newspaper ‘baby Twitterer’ seeks help

November 11th, 2008

Today, I received a DM to the @statesman account from @newshub, which is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It said: “Baby Twitterer here. How do we make our Twitter operation as cool as yours?”

I responded using Tinypaste, which is a handy little tool that allows you to blow past the 140 character Twitter limit.

Here’s what I said:

You’re on the right path (not turning on Twitterfeed is half the battle). Next: Reply to followers, ask them questions and retweet good material. Check out my last post on @statesman – I retweeted a reader’s pic from our Veterans Day parade.

Promo your Twitter efforts on your site somewhere (like I did at http://statesman.com/twitter).

Bonus points: See if you can get your sports editor to live Tweet Packers games. Then, see if you can get a developer to scrape your followers Tweets onto a page (like we do at http://statesman.com/bevotwitter).

Also, check out the blog I do with Daniel Honigman. We’ll offer a lot of tips/tricks.

Feel free to bounce ideas off me anytime. We’re still trying to figure this all out, too.

Good luck!
Robert

I also DM’d the Journal to say that it was great to “see a real human staffing these newspaper accounts.” The response? “We’re big fans of humans here.”

Not everyone is.

Entry Filed under: Newspaper, Twitter