New Found Journalism: Social Media for Careers and Companies

Throughout my two months working for the Financial and Educational PR agency FourBroadgate in London, I learnt that social media plays not just a ‘social’ but crucial role in the workplace. I cannot speak for other companies, but my own experience enabled me to use and explore on a daily basis social media, in order to complete tasks for clients. Working alongside both external investment companies and journalists, I discovered in ‘new found’ terms how I became a citizen journalist myself, gathering, pulling together and distributing information from social media accounts that was regarded as very important to our clients.

Screenshot: FourBroadgate

One of the tasks I frequently completed was a social media analysis, using social media analysis tools, such as Followerwonk and SumAll.

Screenshot:Followerwonk

Screenshot: Followerwonk: Gender Ratio

Screenshot: Followerwonk: Location

Followerwonk is a Twitter Analytics website, which allows users free of charge to search for bios, compare content on Twitter accounts, analyse and track and arrange followers. When filling in the ‘social media analysis’ chart I would mainly use the ‘Analyse’ section on Followerwonk. This allowed me analyse beneath the surface of Twitter and collect statistics on the followers of a client’s Twitter account, in particular the location and gender ratio of their followers. As well as Twitter, I also analysed other social media accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Screenshot: FourBroadgate Social Media Analysis

Similarly, SumAll calls itself a “brand new interface”, whereby users can gain a greater understanding of their followers and from this target a specific audience. A website primarily for the use of Marketing companies, as their features help improve social media campaigns and divide a Twitter audience in terms of Time Zone, Network Size and Engagement data, as a way of distributing more precisely and effectively adverts and messages. The website also offers an ‘Autotweet’ section, which allows a series of tweets to be created and then sent out at designated time. All fundamental tasks in both the marketing and PR industry. I used this website much like Followerwonk and categorised follower information and statistics under different headings.

Screenshot: SumAll

Screenshot: SumAll Social Media Campaigns

Screenshot: SumAll Dividing Tweets

Screenshot: SumAll Autotweets

Other companies may use other social media analytic tools, such as Twuffer, which allows the Twitter user to compose a list of pre-written tweets and schedule their release, much like SumAll. This means that companies can keep their Twitter updated without having to take time out of their other work load. Not only for PR and Marketing companies, this can also be an extremely beneficial tool for journalists and journalism organisations, who can connect with their audience over the social media platform Twitter and still go about their day to day news gathering and reporting. In an age of digital journalism, journalists have double the amount of work load, because news can be spread via so many different mediums, therefore Twuffer works as an invaluable tool for busy journalists. A list of other free to use social media analytic tools are listed in this link.

Screenshot: Twuffer

These forms of social media analysis tools seem to be growing in popularity within the workplace and can even be regarded as a new form of journalism, because the data and information collected is beneficial to another individual or company. Additionally, they pose as a form of communicating and passing on information, which pretty much sums up what journalism is. Simply making the whole concept of journalism far more exciting!