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Which journalists aren’t worth engaging with on Twitter?

Consider the following argument:

Most journalists are on Twitter.

PRs should therefore spend more time “engaging” with journalists on Twitter.

Seems to make logical sense (from a PR standpoint).

Except that just because a journalist has a Twitter account, loads of followers and Tweets for Britain, doesn’t mean that PRs should attempt to interact and engage with every relevant journalist on Twitter.  The reason being that some are far more likely to share your content and actually talk to you than others.

But how do work out which is which?

One way is to use a tool like Twitonomy.

For example, look at the following analysis of Charles Arthur, The Guardian’s Technology Editor.

charles1

Over the last two months, he has Tweeted (on average) nearly 55 times per day. From an engagement standpoint, he certainly seems to mention other people a lot – and 74pc of his Tweets are actually @ replies to other people. So as a PR, you might think this is a good way to have a dialogue with him (better still of course, would be to get him to follow you – then you can have private DM conversations).

However, Charles hasn’t shared that many links in the last two months – so the chances that he is going to share that press release of yours is going to be pretty low. He doesn’t ReTweet that much either – so don’t get your hopes up on that front.

Going back to Charles’ propensity to reply to people, Twitonomy also reveals who has had the most conversations with in the last two months:

charles2

Not may PR people in that group (Charles himself has already pointed out that he doesn’t think this tells us much – other than that the community of people he has talked to via Twitter over the last two months is pretty broad).

If you were determined to have a go at interacting with Charles, Twitonomy also reveals those times when he most likely to Tweet (and thus presumably be online and on Twitter):

charles3

Based on this analysis, 11pm on Friday night.

Clearly, you need to use these metrics with caution. These stats only relate to the last two months. Even if they did range over a wider time frame, how much you can actually infer from this is a moot point. And a cynic might argue that rather than poring over this kind of data, someone trying to get Charles’ attention would be better off investing their time in actually coming up with a decent story angle.

Having said that, I do think tools like Twitonomy – when used appropriately – can be a useful guide to PRs who want to work out the propensity of target journalists to share links, engage in dialogue and/or RT content.

And armed with this knowledge, PRs can allocate engagement resources appropriately. If the end result is better targetting and more effort in giving journalists more relevant and timely information, surely that can’t be a bad thing.

What do you think? Is there something in this? Or is it complete hokum? The comments box awaits your answer.

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Technology PR

How to decide in less than 5 seconds whether to keep or kill a feed: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur, Technology Editor, The Guardian

Technology Guardian Editor Charles Arthur has some good tips on how to deal with the modern malaise of feedcreep (key points highlighted in bold):

Kill if:
* daily content consists of “today’s links:” followed by links and no new content.
* posts consist of no new content that I couldn’t find elsewhere, or just think of myself. (Musings on the crack in their living room wall or the new curtains they bought don’t count.)
* Haven’t updated the blog for more than 30 days (a “dinosaur”, in NNW’s parlance. Though I kept Tim Berners-Lee’s blog.)
* feeds are partial. Listen, don’t try to tempt me to come to your site to read your fantastically insightful things. There are very few organisations that can manage that, and of them, most are newspapers or very high-flown analysts of a sector. I just don’t bother with partial feeds any more. Apart from anything, most people can’t (a) write a good teaser (b) come up with any sort of analysis that makes it worth clicking through. Your overall traffic will surely be higher with full feeds. I’ve made this site full feed from day 1 because I couldn’t see any benefit from making people come to it. Yes, a few sites do deserve a clickthrough. But even then, it’s a barrier to reading. Barriers online don’t help.

Keep if:
* they’re in a sector where I want to hear the authentic voice of the user or programmer or problem solver
* they’re consistently able to throw new light on things I’m interested in
* they have a track record of telling you about things before they get big
* they’ve got a full feed.