Social media is key to audience-journalist relationships

Journalists work hard to serve their audiences with information that would affect their day to day lives. Usually, journalists form their relationships with audiences through social media.

By maintaining those relationships through multiple platforms and through analyzing their metrics, journalists can improve their relationships with their audiences, and in turn, their reporting.

When it comes to a platform like Twitter, a democratized platform for the most part, journalists can tweet out into the world, asking for sources, information or just generally posting about the stories they work on. In response, audience members can tweet back with answers or even questions about the stories they write.

On platforms like Facebook and Instagram though, they tend to be a bit more regulated. Journalists have the ability to delete comments from their posts, and even block people from commenting on their posts.

Additionally, looking at metrics is the key to maintaining and improving audience-journalist relationships. By simply looking at how your audience engages with your content, a journalist can decide how to improve their content, or evaluate what they need to work on.

It’s important that when posting on their social media though, journalists remain unbiased. By just providing the facts, audiences can discuss their opinions on the facts by commenting or tweeting.

Journalists don’t necessarily need to engage with their opinions, but by providing the facts, they’re giving their audience a space to develop their own thoughts. In fact, they should probably avoid engaging with tweets that lean towards one viewpoint over another.