I wrapped up my first week as Social Media Editor at the Quad-City Times and it certainly was an eye opening experience.
The change of pace is drastically different, as I notice time flying by even faster than when I was working on the desk. I credit that with the fact that I actually enjoy what I'm doing and look forward to heading into work.
I lucked out right away when we had an early-morning car accident - a head-on collision between a car and an ambulance - that resulted in a fatality, which resulted in several views on our Facebook page and referrals in 4% range. Typically traffic sits in the 2% range. By the end of the day that fatality picked up 9,000-plus views.
The second day we managed to get the ID of the high school student who was killed in the crash. That traffic rocketed early on Facebook and surpassed the 10,000-plus mark pretty quickly.
We're sitting at 25,829 likes and I'd like to increase that. I don't know what the logistics would be of increasing our likes to 30,000. The difficulty lies in Facebook's terminal mentality. The website doesn't really want you to leave, and so link outs aren't encouraged.
We also started to implement a slideshow gallery on qctimes.com that includes our front page with a link to a list of Times vendors and machines. We posted an album of front pages on our Facebook page as well as on Pinterest.
Our Pinterest traffic is increasing. We started with 282 followers and are now up to 303, which is a trend that I hope continues. I started several new boards including the Front Pages, News Stories and a QC Varsity board.
I changed around the cover photots and moved various boards around to try and highlight some of our more important boards. I want to keep the number of boards semi-limited. We're sitting at 17 boards, and I might increase it to about 20 in a week or so, but I'm more focused on filling some of our under-utilized boards. I still have some space in the Family Fun board, and I also want to fill out my News Stories board.
Twitter has also experiences some rejuvenation. I talked with a couple of Times Twitter users and worked out a few strategies for increasing traffic and followers. One reporter was retweeting headlines for us, and while I'm sure it was generating traffic, I convinced him to try and find a new angle or a fresh look to include with his tweets. We already have automated feeds that grabs headlines and retweets stories for us, so I didn't really feel that we needed the same thing from one of our reporters. He seemed to really appreciate the feedback.
I'm hoping to restart some of our older Twitter accounts, including the once-popular @QCvarsity account. Instead of giving it to one person to retweet from, I'm going to open it up to all of our prep reporters in the hopes that we get some great coverage. Another account that we have is @QCOpinion, which is currently an automated feed that grabs headlines from our online Editorial page. I'm hoping that if our editorial editor doesn't want to take it over, that I'll take it over. It's certainly something we can promote and we have tons of online interaction between comments, letters to the editor and various chat opportunities.
The change of pace is drastically different, as I notice time flying by even faster than when I was working on the desk. I credit that with the fact that I actually enjoy what I'm doing and look forward to heading into work.
I lucked out right away when we had an early-morning car accident - a head-on collision between a car and an ambulance - that resulted in a fatality, which resulted in several views on our Facebook page and referrals in 4% range. Typically traffic sits in the 2% range. By the end of the day that fatality picked up 9,000-plus views.
The second day we managed to get the ID of the high school student who was killed in the crash. That traffic rocketed early on Facebook and surpassed the 10,000-plus mark pretty quickly.
We're sitting at 25,829 likes and I'd like to increase that. I don't know what the logistics would be of increasing our likes to 30,000. The difficulty lies in Facebook's terminal mentality. The website doesn't really want you to leave, and so link outs aren't encouraged.
We also started to implement a slideshow gallery on qctimes.com that includes our front page with a link to a list of Times vendors and machines. We posted an album of front pages on our Facebook page as well as on Pinterest.
Our Pinterest traffic is increasing. We started with 282 followers and are now up to 303, which is a trend that I hope continues. I started several new boards including the Front Pages, News Stories and a QC Varsity board.
I changed around the cover photots and moved various boards around to try and highlight some of our more important boards. I want to keep the number of boards semi-limited. We're sitting at 17 boards, and I might increase it to about 20 in a week or so, but I'm more focused on filling some of our under-utilized boards. I still have some space in the Family Fun board, and I also want to fill out my News Stories board.
Twitter has also experiences some rejuvenation. I talked with a couple of Times Twitter users and worked out a few strategies for increasing traffic and followers. One reporter was retweeting headlines for us, and while I'm sure it was generating traffic, I convinced him to try and find a new angle or a fresh look to include with his tweets. We already have automated feeds that grabs headlines and retweets stories for us, so I didn't really feel that we needed the same thing from one of our reporters. He seemed to really appreciate the feedback.
I'm hoping to restart some of our older Twitter accounts, including the once-popular @QCvarsity account. Instead of giving it to one person to retweet from, I'm going to open it up to all of our prep reporters in the hopes that we get some great coverage. Another account that we have is @QCOpinion, which is currently an automated feed that grabs headlines from our online Editorial page. I'm hoping that if our editorial editor doesn't want to take it over, that I'll take it over. It's certainly something we can promote and we have tons of online interaction between comments, letters to the editor and various chat opportunities.
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