How the Tucson Weekly became the top Twitter feed for local Tucson news
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Twitter may not be the “it” web site it once was, but it has proven a valuable tool in order to boost referral traffic for news sites.
Over the past few months, the Tucson Weekly and Inside Tucson Business have carefully been developing and cultivating their Twitter feeds.
For the effort put in, the Weekly is now the most-followed Twitter feed for local Tucson news and is neck and neck for the most-followed alt-weekly in Arizona. Inside Tucson Business is currently holding the number three spot, outpacing every other newspaper in the area and all but one of the local TV stations.
How did they do it?
“The other thing we were careful to do on our Twitter and Facebook feeds was to only feature our content,” said Territorial Newspapers Web Producer Nick Smith. “A lot of times you see feeds from news sites throw everything they have up, including news from Afghanistan and the latest from the entertainment world. We know they don’t have any foreign bureaus, so why pretend that you do? If I sign up for a Tucson feed, I want Tucson news.”
The use of Twitter for news organizations is two-fold. It provides a way for them to promote their content and it allows for a way to see what people are talking about. By focusing on Twitter users in Tucson, the two papers have a built-in network of not only what’s going on in town, but if a major emergency were to happen, they already have connections to people all over town who may be already on the scene.
Both papers followed users who identified themselves as Tweeting from Tucson or were followers of another local news organization’s feed. Sites like Refollow.com provided tools to quickly identify a potential audience.
“It might seem counter intuitive to spend time on social networks,” Smith said. “But when you consider that people won’t be checking your Web site at all time but they may be on Twitter all the time, it just makes sense to develop those channels.”