A recently conducted survey revealed that social media is used by 96 percent of journalists on a daily basis. The survey also states that almost 42 percent of journalists feel that they would be unable to execute their work in the absence of social media. This is enough to prove the significant role that social media plays in the life of journalists.
The roles and responsibilities of journalists are changing with time. Some of the important roles of journalists are as follows:
1. Interviewing influencers
2. Finding content for stories
3. Filtering content
4. Verifying stories
5. Adding tweets and videos
The above roles and responsibilities is enough to explain why journalists prefer using social media on a daily basis. Apparently Twitter is the most preferred network for journalists and 92 per cent of journalists use Twitter on regular basis. Thus, Twitter dominates the list of social media management tools.
Social media is used by journalists in one of the following ways- sourcing news, monitoring news, verifying news, publishing news, promoting news and networking. Most of the social media platforms used by marketers can prove very helpful for journalists for managing their time in an effective way. Here is a list of top five free social media management tools for journalists:
1. Topsy: This social search tool has been acquired by Apple recently. Topsy archives all tweets ever since Twitter was launched in 2006. All you need to do is search for a specific topic to read all the Tweets that were twitted in a definite period.
2. BuzzSumo: This is another tool that is quite comparable to Topsy. The advantage of BuzzSumo is that it can search for contents that are most shared across the most popular social networks- Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google Plus. One can search for a particular topic and sort out the content on the basis of article, infographic and video. Besides this, the results can be filtered on the basis of date, week and months. It also allows you to filter by influencers, bloggers, journalists, companies and common people.
3. Hootsuite: It is another highly used social media management tools that can be accessed free of cost. Once can install up to five social media accounts on Hootsuite’s free version and then continue posting, scheduling and evaluating ones activities. The features pertaining to review and analytics are however limited in the free version of this tool. Nevertheless, Hootsuite makes it easy to manage and schedule your posts.
4. Buffer: If you are looking for a alternative to Hootsuite, Buffer is the right choice for you. It functions a bit differently from Hootsuite as Buffer enables you to pre-schedule your posts five times a day. As and when you come across remarkable content, you can share the same using the browser plug-in so that it immediately reaches your Buffer to be posted in the subsequent free slot available in your schedule. Buffer too has a free version.
5. Google Media Tools: Google has recently launched Google Media Tools for reporters and journalists. This unique tool aims at helping journalists and reporters find and use the wide variety of tools introduced by Google so that they can easily research and organize their news stories.
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