Journalist Connecting with their Audience
The ideal relationship between a journalist and audience member is for it to be a friendly, or a reliable one. When journalist post about their work on social media they want positive interactions, so it can spread positivity as well as important information. Audience members want the journalist to be reliable and accurate with the information being given out. This an ideal relationship simply because both the journalist and the audience will rely on each other. As long as those guidelines are met, the public will come to them for information.
“Many in the industry believe that the best way for newsrooms to recover both revenue and public trust is to improve their relationship with their audiences.”, Jacob L. Nelson Assistant Professor of digital audience engagement, Arizona State University said.
This quote is so true because big companies want their social media accounts to be looked at as trustworthy and if someone works for them they want them to follow their policies as well. When they interact with the public, that means more people will see their brand. Therefore, that will bring in revenue for them and that is always good for companies.
When a journalist tweets everyday their chances of gaining more followers increase because the more interactions the better. It is better to post something then to not post at all, that is one of the reasons journalists are always putting information out on social media for people to see it.
“Bill Simmons saw a burst of engagement in late April of this year when he Tweeted 22 times about Donald Sterling, Adam Silver, and the NBA from April 26–29. During that time, an on-location Tweet from the Clippers game garnered 2,422 Retweets. Over four days, @BillSimmons added 6,000 new followers.” Elizabeth Breese said.
A Chart of Bill Simmons followers, by Muck Rack.
When Bill Simmons spoke about this hot topic during that time, he knew people would see it. The more people that saw this, the more followers he was gaining because the public was sharing his post. This is a good strategy to use when a person wants more followers and when they want to spread their thoughts.
The picture above is from Adam Schefter, he is an ESPN Journalist. His job is to inform his audience about football teams and players. The tweet above is him describing a player who signed to the Indianapolis Colts and their fans want to keep up to date with their team. Now his audience add in the comment section that other teams missed out on the opportunity to sign this player or how the Colts improved from this addition to the team. This is a great example of how he has built an audience who rely on his information for football news.
In general, at the end of the day a journalist is going to want to have a fan base to support them. The bigger the interaction on social media, the bigger the audience will be and the community will make the journalist become more well-known around the area.
