The business world might still be dominated by men but the “world’s leading business publication” doesn’t only want to speak to them. Social Media Editor Liz Heron is trying to broaden The Wall Street Journal‘s readership with content that appeals to a younger, female audience.

That’s a tall order for WSJ, whose audience is predominantly male (82 percent), with an average age of 57. For comparison’s sake, The New York Times, where Heron left her social media position last spring, claims an equal male-female readership with an average age of 51.

“For any print newspaper, we’ve all been looking to find readers and subscribers,” Heron told The Content Strategist. “We’re taking advantage of communities like Pinterest that happen to have a lot of women as an opportunity to highlight our lesser-known coverage.”

One way to reach a broader audience is by showcasing broader viewpoints. In August, WSJ launched Worldstream, which plays video on a wide variety of topics from a wide variety of locations. The social team collaborate on it with Mark Scheffler’s mobile video unit.

The video platform, Heron says, is a way for WSJ to use its journalists from around the world. “It brings readers along with us, where they can’t go,” said Heron, who graduated from Oberlin College, where she focused on Latin American studies.

Already Worldstream has brought WSJ readers on a number of adventures, from the Senkaku Islands to see the dispute between China and Japan, to the streets of Bagdhad for knockoff fastfood. The video stream is one of the broadsheet’s wide variety of social media efforts, which are handled by the six fulltime journalists who comprise WSJ’s social media team.

The team employs social media strategies that are tailored to each platform. For example, to post to Twitter, WSJ uses Socialflow. It can measure audience interest in a certain topic and release tweets — written earlier by the social media team — accordingly.

The strategy for Facebook, on the other hand, is more image-driven.

“Facebook is more of a personal network — it has a lower tolerance for realtime coverage,” Heron, 34, said. ”It’s easier to grasp something visual when you’re grazing through your social media news feed. It’s also easier to share with friends: ‘Look at this graph. It will tell you everything you need to know about the Facebook IPO.’”

Heron, said she discovered the true power of social media in 2009, when she was working in her hometown of Washington, DC at The Washington Post. There, at the foreign desk during the Iranian election protests, she worked with a reporter in Iran who couldn’t leave his apartment. From the US she worked with him to find information through YouTube and Twitter.

“It’s like having eyes in different places,” Heron said. “It really woke me up to the possibilites of social media.”

Heron contributed to WSJ’s streaming multimedia and social coverage of the presidential campaigns. The streaming coverage, which she called a ”live blog on steroids,” combined traditional news stories, with social media, video, pictures and comments.

The social focus covered the election, but it also covered social media — when social media itself was the news. For Heron, that meant Big Bird and Clint Eastwood’s chair both shared space — and a platform — with traditional election coverage.

Journalism is changing. Perhaps the demographics of WSJ readers might too.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Michael Hayes’ ambition to make BuzzFeed the number one social news organization is predicated on the idea that social media is the new news.

“Twitter is the new press scrum,” BuzzFeed’s social media editor told The Content Strategist. “It’s the place where news goes to break first.”

He’s not wrong.

The world of news has largely become intertwined with that of social media, so much so that Hayes said BuzzFeed readers come to the site — or, more appropriately, to its Twitter feed — with the intention of sharing media. The BuzzFeed staff curates viral content with the idea that such content is what people inherently want to read about.

“Basically we want to be a device for people to share news and content with friends,” Hayes said, “because that’s how people prefer to get their news these days.”

His work day involves trudging through social media and content on two computer screens, one dedicated exclusively to TweetDeck. Appropriately, BuzzFeed’s posts are short and sweet and made for sharing, not just driving people to the site (which at 25 million unique monthly visitors happens plenty anyway).

And BuzzFeed is growing. Since Hayes, a Fordham University communications graduate, began working there a year and a half ago, the staff has gone from 25 to 140. The editorial team — which like many news organizations also includes the social media editor — recently moved to a second floor in Buzz Feed’s Flat Iron office building.

That growth is partly from doing what readers want.

“People sign up for a social network because they want to be on that network,” Hayes, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, said. “They don’t want to constantly be sent away from Twitter.”

If news story breaks, BuzzFeed will often send out a slew of tweets immediately, before putting up a post. For traditionalists, this might sound like a media company scooping itself — but it’s really just finding what’s already on social media anyway and pushing it out to its audience.

That doesn’t mean BuzzFeed isn’t trying to drive traffic to its own site — it absolutely is, posting approximately 40 to 50 links to its site a day.

“Beyond that, we also do other stuff so people like us more on Twitter,” he said.

For Hayes, who formerly worked at a PR firm, that sometimes means no links to the site at all.

For example, when the space shuttle Enterprise flew over Manhattan in April, it seemed like everyone in New York City, including news organizations, was posting pictures of the shuttle as it crossed the city skyline.

To add to what was clearly a shared social moment, Hayes tweeted: “Retweet this if you ever wanted to be an astronaut.” It was retweeted nearly 900 times. What the retweets, in effect, show are what types of posts are popular — and as content strategists know, those are frequently articles that evoke an emotional response.

BuzzFeed espouses a Tweet first, post later mentality, to keep up with the ever-speedy news cycle. Such was the case the day of the Empire State Building shootings in August, when BuzzFeed sent out more than a dozen tweets before it even posted on its website.

“The news was breaking on Twitter, so it was important for us to be a part of that conversation so that we knew what was happening in real-time,” Hayes said.

After BuzzFeed’s post was up, Hayes continued to retweet people on the scene, news reports and even updates to the post. Writing about what is popular may seem backward to traditional journalists — as do many things about BuzzFeed.

A notable example of this was when a writer from Slate found that many of BuzzFeed’s highly popular lists, as well as some text, were taken from other sites without accreditation, (These posts have since been updated with sources.)

Hayes said Politico’s Ben Smith, who took the editorial helm at the start of the year, is bringing the organization in a more journalistic direction — which to Hayes is inseparable from social media.

Hayes was also quick to dismiss the sourcing controversy by referring to his ethos for tweets, saying that BuzzFeed has moved on.

“Twitter doesn’t want to be spit back to itself,” he said. “We’re looking for the next step in the conversation.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Sports Illustrated uses something old to make something new — or at least different — in social media. The media company has been documenting sports history in photos since its first issue 58 years ago this month.

These days SI Special Projects Producer Andy Gray leverages that collection of 30 million photographs in ways its photographers and their contracts could have never predicted — and in ways other social media producers should heed.

“For Sports Illustrated as a brand, we’re not the first choice for lots of fans because we don’t have a TV station you can go to, like ESPN,” Gray, who has been at SI since interning there in 2005, told The Content Strategist.

What SI does have is history.

“I started the SI Vault Twitter feed because SI has so many great pictures,” Gray, who now tweets for the account 10-15 times a day, said. “We’d send someone to the 1984 World Series to take pictures and they’d just sit there in the basement collecting dust.”

Gray’s method is known to content strategists and companies alike. Consider for example how Mint and OkCupid used their own data to provide insights outside of their companies’ main focus. SI is doing so with photos, using historic images to draw insights about today’s sports—and also just to show off its cool old pics.

Gray began the Twitter feed by posting archived stories and photos, but soon realized that images were much more social media friendly.

“Photos resonate a lot more than stories,” Gray said.

Indeed the photos he posts often garner hundreds of retweets. Last month, the photo gallery When Pro Athletes Were In Little League saw 5 million hits.

“It’s just like porn for sports fans,” Gray, who is in charge of SI’s photo blog, the SI Vault Twitter as well as special projects, said. “Who doesn’t want to see Peyton Manning as a 7-year-old?”

Gray attributes this love of photos to readers who divide their attention with hundreds of Twitter posts and don’t necessarily have time to read full-length articles. But he also believes there is something about photos that can speak across time.

“Social media is mostly younger people, and Sports Illustrated doesn’t mean as much to them as someone who is 40,” Gray, 35, said. He said older Twitter users are an “easy sell” because they enjoy the nostalgia of SI’s old photos, photos they might remember seeing in the magazine as kids.

Younger readers are more challenging. To reach people 25 and under, Gray uses a “combination of cool and rare photos” that he accompanies with “a little snark.”

But he added, “A cool Michael Jordan picture is a cool Michael Jordan picture whether you’re 15 or 50.”

Every major publication has a social media strategy. SI has a traditional social media team that consists of eight people. Its main accounts have 257,000 Facebook fans and nearly 400,000 on Twitter, much more than SI Vault’s 65,000 Twitter followers and the accompanying Tumblr‘s 45,000.

What makes SI Vault successful, however, is its ability to provide content that no one else has or expects.

That’s partly because Gray doesn’t know what to expect either.

Gray said he believes he has a “fairly common” taste, giving him an ability to determine what others will like, but he said it’s an imperfect art.

“I put up pictures sometimes that I think everyone will love but nobody cares about” and vice versa, he said. “It’s somewhat of a guessing game for me.”

This guessing game involves searching the archives using key words in a system that is not always — especially for older photos — well-tagged. Gray has to be creative. For example: searching “courtesy of” to find childhood photos of athletes.

He also uses these searches to come up with galleries that are more interesting than the everyday. He’s searched everything from “dinner” to combination searches like “laughing” and “locker room.”

The results are far-reaching, from photos of Ohio cheerleaders in 1960  to Tiger Woods as a kid to a gallery of the best kisses in sports.

These photos can take viewers anywhere in place and time. The only restriction on his posts, Gray said, is being smart. SI doesn’t have a social media policy but Gray follows the advice of his boss:

“If you really have to think about whether or not you should be doing it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” Gray said. “It’s the best advice I’ve gotten.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The Huffington Post is a social media beast. The “internet newspaper” has 657,000 Facebook fans, nearly 2 million Twitter followers and a commentary rate that can rival total page views on other news sites.

Additionally with HuffPost Live 321 — a live streaming video network featuring community contributors that’s set to launch later this month — social media will become an editorial product itself.

Launched in 2005, Arianna Huffington’s namesake publication has lots of balls in the air and requires an entire social media team as well as open-minded strategy to keep them going.

“It’s a lot to deal with,” Dean Praetorius, HuffPo’s senior editor of trends and social media, said regarding the site’s more than 50 vertical accounts, covering subjects as oppositional as weddings and divorce and as far-reaching as politics and entertainment.

The editors for these sections create their own social media posts, which HuffPo’s social media team can then choose to use for the website’s main accounts, which have the capability of catapulting content to devices across the world.

“We are very well aware that our main feeds can be launching pads for viral content,” said Praetorius, 24, a Boston College graduate in communications.

Viral posts, in turn, drive more traffic to the website. Whether something will reach that level of popularity, however, largely depends on its content, Praetorius said.

“It can be everything from a great blog post people don’t expect to something that gets people having a conversation about the news,” he said. “Some of our most viral posts are the most commented as well.”

HuffPo employs 486 people, including a social team of seven, a community team of six plus 30 moderators and more than 300 in editorial, and manages 30,000 unpaid bloggers (10,000 of which have posted in the last 90 days).

HuffPo relies heavily on analytics to determine its social media strategy. Using Bit.ly data as well as its own, HuffPo determined that user interaction with its tweets plateaus around the five-minute mark, so that’s how frequently the main account posts on Twitter.

That’s a lot of tweets, but Praetorius, who oversees strategic projects in social media, said they’re not “stepping on our own toes.”

“We know we’re not losing followers as a result of how much we tweet,” he said. “We’re not tweeting so often that people aren’t engaging with our tweets.”

Indeed, retweets and Facebook shares of HuffPo content consistently number in the hundreds, which drives traffic but also creates a sense of community for readers.

“At the end of the day, traffic is a concern but it isn’t the only concern,” Praetorius said. HuffPo uses its comments to shape future social media strategy.

“We always do care about the commenters and what they care about,” Praetorius said. “So when suggestions come in through Facebook and Twitter, we look at what they are, not just for timeliness but what will engage our audience.”

Cultivating a strong comments community requires upkeep. HuffPo uses Julia, a word analysis program, to flag abusive comments and prevents trolls from creating an atmosphere that stifles discussion. According to Praetorius, HuffPo’s vibrant commentary community also polices itself.  As proof, he said, HuffPo doesn’t frequently delete comments.

The web news giant has an equally hands-off approach to social media policy: It doesn’t really have one. Instead, Praetorius said HuffPo judges social media on a case-by-case basis and encourages “good judgement,” “creativity” and alternatives to straight news headlines to promote user engagement.

“We’re not keeping people from having opinions or a conversation,” he said. “We don’t want things to end with just putting out a link.”

This means HuffPo posts are provocative — usually an interesting quote, a perplexing query or a juicy bit of information — and are meant to drive page views and conversation.

And if you’ve ever seen a HuffPo comment thread, you’ll know reading the article is only the beginning of a discussion.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Jessica Lee needs to make one-way broadcasts a two-way street. That means encouraging social media on platforms that are not especially web-friendly, namely Democracy Now!‘s television and radio news hour.

Unlike news stations and publications, Democracy Now! broadcasts on borrowed time and platforms, giving it little in the way of pro bono advertising. To heighten the matter, the independent publication relies on viewer contributions to exist.

“Because we’re a nonprofit, we must look at how we are transitioning viewers into actual money, whereas other news outlets aren’t asking for support specifically,” Social Media and Online Outreach Coordinator Jessica Lee said of Democracy Now!, which airs on TV and radio stations across the world, as well as online and on podcasts. “The audience is going to vote with their dollars for programing that’s important.”

Specialized content builds loyalty, followers

Fortunately for Democracy Now!, Lee says it has both unique content and viewers.

“People are really thirsty for news that’s different,” Lee, a former independent media journalist and teacher, said. ”We’re not network news; we’re not flashy.”

Rather Democracy Now! prides itself on its rare perspectives, given through long interviews. ”Our readers sift through our content and are really interested in thinking about it,” Lee said.” We have a smart audience that’s more globally aware.”

They also respond well to social media.

When Lee, 31, became Democracy Now!’s first social media coordinator in 2010, all of the program’s sharing platforms were automated, and the show had 80,000 Facebook fans.

“Once we started doing daily updates and interacting with our readers, our numbers went up greatly,” said Lee. The program now has 282,000 Facebook and 177,000 Twitter followers. In the same time the program moved from 700 to more than 1,000 stations.

To continue the growth through social media, Lee must leverage Democracy Now!’s one-hour broadcasts into easily consumable bites.

“Journalists usually prepare packages of content: an article, pull quote, graphic—social media is doing the opposite now,” Lee said.  ”You still have to do a traditional story and multimedia, but then you have to know how to take it apart and make sure it makes sense in simple components.”

This has repercussions for news creation and dissemination.

“Social media is now a production question,” Lee said. “In the early creation of the story itself, we consider how we’re going to put it on social media.”

Despite this, the content still has to be repackaged: shortening headlines to 100 characters to fit Facebook, using SEO and putting keywords up at the top of the attendant text.

“We sometimes write very straight news headlines, which are accurate, but are not going to catch people’s eye on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter,” Lee said. “If you get a story voted at very top of Reddit, it brings in a ton of traffic to your website, no joke.”

Hopefully, by extension, that traffic creates a more committed and generous viewership.

Lee said she is also diligent about tagging Facebook groups in articles that might interest them and working with social media editors from stations on which Democracy Now! airs to mutually promote each other.

Tending to the relationships that sustain the station

For Lee, maintaining a relationship with viewers is not just about getting them Democracy Now!’s content, but making sure the content suits them. Democracy Now! frequently solicits tips, guest suggestions and ideas.

Going through the comments and conversations on social media, Lee can see when there’s an outlier of interest or demand, and inform the producers accordingly.

But for such a publication that depends so heavily on its viewership, Lee says there’s a long way to go.

“I would say we’re not there completely yet because we don’t have a full-time online editor and we just sort of produce our own content based on our one-hour daily show,” she said. “If we want to keep people on the page day and night throughout world, we need to compete with the breaking news world, and have a specified person doing online curation and updating things we covered on the show.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Though countries vary in their approach to social media, its importance is not lost in translation.

Early next year, Univision and ABC will launch the first 24-hour English-language Latino news channel. Currently it exists as a Tumblr called Univision News, slated to become its own website at the end of the summer.

The channel will accommodate a continually growing population of Latinos who prefer English as well as non-Latinos, for whom the goings-on in Latin and South America are of increasing consequence.

Conz Preti will be in charge of managing the channel’s social media conversations, which vary depending on a country’s connectivity and approach to social media.

Preti said that while many users may consider social media a time-waster, even poorly connected countries have their power tweeters who are making social media an integral part of the news cycle, regardless of language. That extends to those who have immigrated to the US.

“I’ve worked online for the past 10 years and I feel the gap is finally closing regarding social media for Latin America compared to the US,” said Preti, who previously worked as a social media manager in advertising. ”Here [in the US] it is very common to tweet at a brand with a complaint. It is even more common to break news on social platforms. The same attitude and behavior towards social media are happening in Spanish-speaking countries.”

At the last Census, over 50 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin lived in the US, up 43 percent from 2000. Among those 50 million, more watch English-language (45 percent) television than Spanish-language (28 percent), according to a 2011 Pew Hispanic Center survey.

“There’s a niche,” the 29-year-old said. ”The children of immigrants that came here years ago that grew up here — they speak English, they feel American, they are American, but have ties to Latino countries.”

Preti herself represents a niche. Born in Argentina and raised between Colombia and Brazil before coming to the US to attend Columbia Journalism School, she speaks fluent Spanish, English and Portuguese.

“I consume news in English, and I don’t feel I get enough of what I need,” Preti said, referring to paltry coverage of big issues such as Argentina’s riots and Brazil’s booming economy. “The only time I heard about Chile was when the miners were stuck there.”

Additionally, she said the channel will provide a Latino angle on non-Latino news.

Preti emphasized that the channel has news that affects everyone, regardless of their Latino connection. “We’re trying to inform people about all these other issues that are coming up on a world scale,” she said.

Univision News’ eye on the Latino-American social media sphere has led it to uncover stories that the mainstream media missed, such as when a Playboy bunny participated in the Mexican presidential debates or when a disabled Venezuelan man ran the New York Marathon with little coverage besides a loyal Twitter following.

Preti uses her advertising contacts as well as her personal, multilingual following to mine for tips, information as well as user-generated content.

“You can’t always run out to Mexico,” said Preti, who recently used her social media savvy to help with coverage of the Mexican presidential election, ”so it’s a great tool for that.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

CNBC Social Media Editor Mary Catherine Wellons doesn’t think age needs be a dividing line between TV viewers and social media users.

That said, television news does present a unique set of problems for social media editors: most notably, encouraging older users of a traditionally passive medium to participate across platforms, and at the same time, making television news relevant for a generation that’s growing up on smaller and more interactive screens.

According to a series of Pew studies, the average nightly news viewer is 53 and the average age of morning news viewers is 51. Users of leading social media platforms are on average at least a decade younger, with 26 percent of internet users ages 18-29 using Twitter, double the rate of those ages 30-49.

Closing the generation gap

Wellons, whose job it is to monitor and bolster CNBC’s social media efforts, sees CNBC’s audience moving in both directions, with younger viewers taking an interest in its programming and older users becoming more social media savvy.

CNBC’s social media efforts began five years ago and have only really accelerated in the last couple of years, according to Wellons, who took her current position in October.

The CNBC Twitter account has more than 820,000 followers; Facebook 224,000.

“We have an audience that’s accustomed to tuning in, turning on the television and interacting with content in a very traditional way,” said Wellons, who graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in political and social thought.

“Social media gives this audience access to information on multiple platforms and adds an extra layer of interaction,” she said.

These interactions, she said, are growing despite the gaps in user age.

Crossing platforms

She cited Oracle CEO Larry Ellison joining Twitter and the recent Twitter interaction between oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens and the Canadian hip-hop wunderkind Drake as examples of an older generation engaging on social media. (For the record, the first $10K is the hardest.) 

A younger generation is tuning in to CNBC’s financial coverage, Wellons said, referring specifically to Mad Money’s Jim Cramer, who has a “really cult young audience,” due in part to his college Back to School Tour.

To buoy and accomodate its increasingly integrated audience, CNBC has incorporated a social media panel — what Wellons calls the “hub” of CNBC’s social media efforts —on its HD channel, which is available in 53 million US homes, according to CNBC research.

It showcases, among others, trending stocks on a “Twicker” and staff-curated tweets, including that of CNBC talent, market watchers and viewers alike.

“We’re taking content that’s happing on Twitter and in the social media space and making it visible to the on-air audience,” said Wellons, a former CNBC news associate, reporter and producer. ”It’s meant to support what our viewers are seeing on a daily basis.”

Viewers cannot contribute to social media through the channel, but Wellons hopes to get them online by other means.

Creating an active audience

CNBC hosts a weekly Google+ hangout with a reporter and conducts Twitter-related contests in which viewers can submit related tweets that could make it on air. These  include “Squawk on the Tweet” segment for Squawk on the Street, the #MadTweets  hashtag for Mad Money and the #NailTheNumber sweepstakes for the monthly jobs report.

“The idea here is to engage directly with our audience and give them an opportunity to take part in our broadcast,” Wellons said.

For all the hype about pushing the social media sphere, Wellons, sees social media’s most important virtue as being able to connect on a personal level.

Wellons tweets under her own name and tries to personally respond to as many CNBC Twitter queries as possible.

“I think it’s helpful for our audience to interact with an actual human being,” she said, ”not just the brand.”

Photo courtesy of Deidre Schoo/www.deidreschoo.com

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Anthony De Rosa did not begin his career at Reuters as a social media editor—he wasn’t even in the editorial section.

A marketing major from Rutgers University, De Rosa began working as an API manager for a financial startup that Thompson, which later merged with Reuters, would soon buy.

De Rosa said he had used variations of online social media since he was a teenager, but only discovered its real power later.

“I think during the Green Revolution I started using [social media] a lot more,” De Rosa, the 36-year-old who oversees Reuters’ approximately 30 social media accounts, told The Content Strategist. ”It got my attention as being a way to see what’s going on in other places and provide information that wasn’t available.”

De Rosa, who attracted Reuters’ editors through his highly touted Tumblr, Soup, brought to the position many of the initial sensibilities that drew him to social media. Part of that is an ability to find information that will become popular.

“I really enjoy just sifting through all the information that’s coming at us all day long, being able to pick up something few people are able to dig up,” De Rosa, who began as social media editor last July, said. He said he focuses on finding additional information that can contribute to the story and provide a welcome update for readers.

The main Reuters Twitter feed alone has more than 1.7 million followers, so this information can quickly go viral. “You kind of know [a post will be popular] if it’s a missing piece or something that explains what others weren’t able to explain about a major story,” he said.

To find such information, he pores over documents, cultivated Twitter lists and multimedia content from around the world.

These days De Rosa is steering Reuters away from its dozen auto-fed social media accounts and leading its nearly 3,000 writers—600  of whom he said use social media for work—to social media to aid reporting.

“The first thing I want them to understand is that [social media] is great way to inform themselves; the second is to build audience and drive viewers,” De Rosa said. “It’s important to stay on top of what’s going on with the given topic they’re covering.”

De Rosa reaches Reuters journalists by holding bimonthly trainings led by those already using social media in the field. The workshops consist of journalists explaining how they’ve gotten value or information from social media.

“People think it’s real when they can hear from another journalist how they use it,” De Rosa said.

Eventually De Rosa wants to move social media into center stage in news coverage, as a viable, pertinent and fun element of the main story.

“It seems like a lot of reporting has social media off to the side bar: here’s the article, here’s the things that happened to be said about it on social media,” he said. These social media tidbits tend to be commentary or comments.

De Rosa, who also writes an opinion column and hosts the Tech Tonic video channel for Reuters, wants to integrate verified social media information into the article with the rest of the reporting.

“We’re trying to blur the lines more between traditional news and verified social media,” he said. To do so, De Rosa said, reporters must follow the same rules as they always have.

“I would revert back to traditional journalism ethics and practices when it comes to social media,” De Rosa said. ”Apply the idea of being skeptical and finding corroborating information—don’t go off half-cocked without making sure you’ve confirmed the shared information with multiple sources.”

De Rosa relies on common sense, established sources and services like Storyful to decide what to trust, when it comes to social media content, such as videos from Syria.

For De Rosa, using social media responsibly, but also with an open mind, can lead to better reporting.

“I think they’re trying to be less prescriptive and more trying to guide people to use common sense for the most part,” De Rosa said of Reuters’ social media policy. “When you put too much pressure, it puts people on edge—it doesn’t allow them to use social media as it’s intended.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

For Bloomberg L.P., a media corporation on which much of the world’s financial decisions depend, creating a vibrant social media presence hasn’t always been a priority.

But these days it’s becoming a necessity.

“Our terminal usually has stories scooped before Twitter does—our terminal is the original Twitter,” Mat Yurow, Bloomberg’s social media editor, told The Content Strategist.

“It’s tough to tell our journalists that sometimes you can find these stories before the terminal,” said the 24-year-old responsible for composing, managing and strategizing Bloomberg News and BusinessWeek’s social media presence.

The Bloomberg Terminal is a business wire service that delivers real-time financial data to computer screens and mobile phones across the globe. It’s also the company’s core product.

With its inveterate business model, Bloomberg was in no hurry to lead the social media revolution. The company only hired its first editorial-side social media editor last year.

Now it has two—Yurow, and Kirsten Salyer—who are in charge of the editorial sections’ social media, as well as teaching other employees how to use social media to find stories and sources, and to broadcast work.

Before last year, Bloomberg’s social media presence relied on automated social media posts as stories came out. Updating the old media company to new social media standards required a very direct approach to the way its journalists used social media. Bloomberg does not stake a claim on its reporters’ Facebook accounts.

“That’s really their network to connect with friends and family,” said Yurow. Twitter, however, is fair game.

“Twitter accounts are not private,” Yurow, an Emory University film and marketing grad, said. “We encourage openness—saying, ‘I’m a reporter from Bloomberg: this is what I cover and this is what I tweet.’”

Out of its 2,300 media professionals working from 146 bureaus in 72 countries, only 500 are active on Twitter. But Yurow isn’t necessarily concerned with numbers.

“It’s not as much about getting more to sign up, but to tweet better,” he said.

According to Yurow, tweeting better involves a number of considerations:

• What are you trying to accomplish? Figure out, on a case-by-case basis, whether you’re looking for clicks on your website or retweets on Twitter. Bloomberg wants both. The Terminal often transmits core financial information within a headline. Getting more clicks on its websites involves writing intriguing Twitter posts that don’t give away all the information. To get more retweets,  Yurow suggests making tweets more inclusive by attaching an interesting fact or quote.

• What’s trending? Yurow suggests sites like ComScore, Bit.ly, Topsy and Hootsuite to see what’s trending on social media. Use that information to gauge what content might be most suitable to highlight at the moment.

• What’s working? Pay attention to what gets the best responses or the most retweets. “Figure out who is reading the stories and who is sharing, and the inner tidbits they are sharing,” Yurow said. “Next time you send out a tweet, you can change it a little bit to get more traction.”

• What time? When you know who is reading your tweets, the next step is to decide when tweets would best reach that audience. For example, Yurow suggests sending out finance tweets early in the morning and evening, or delaying technology tweets three-hours to better hit the West Coast.

• Be Flexible. “Social media changes quickly,” said Yurow. “Practices and tools being used today will likely be out of date in a few months.” Be willing to adapt to the times and to new technologies.

• Be a Human. “Twitter is all about knowing there is someone on the other end of the line who will tweet back,” Yurow said. “My job is to remind people I’m here, listening to what you have to say.” This interaction is lost with automated posts.

Last week, Bloomberg.com instituted a breaking news Twitter button that appears atop the page for big stories. According to Yurow, the button drove 8,000 tweets in the first 10 minutes.

Yurow acknowledges that social media success at Bloomberg will require better tweets and an adoption of new web and digital technologies, including API integration and user-generated content.

“Bloomberg has traditionally been an old-media company,” Yurow said. “We’re slowly building confidence in social media.”

For Yurow, building that confidence means extending Bloomberg’s goals of media “transparency” to social media.

Bloomberg’s Midtown offices, he said, visually signify the company’s ethos. “There’s not a single office and all the conference rooms are made of glass,” he said, demonstrating its literal transparency. “There’s not a single private element once you’re inside.”

But in regard to new social media developments at Bloomberg, Yurow was mum, just saying, “We have a lot of ammo we’re ready to release.”

Like what? The Content Strategist asked.

“I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to wait and see.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Eric Carvin, who became the Associated Press social media editor in January, has an ambitious yet simple goal: for all of AP’s 2,500 journalists to use social media and use it well. That means using it not just to promote stories, but to make stories better.

He said one exciting way of doing this was to make use of locator services like Foursquare and location-based mobile video streaming for gathering news and user-generated content.

“More and more, sites and services specialize in helping you zero in on social and visual content based on where something is happening in the world,” said the Yale English grad and social media whiz.

Recently AP reached an agreement with mobile video broadcasting site Bambuser that allows AP to use video content from people around the world.

Carvin, 39,  is first and foremost a journalist, having worked in various editorial positions at the AP over the past 12 years. Now, as social media editor, he monitors approximately two-dozen branded AP Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as the tweets of AP’s 1,000 known Twitter users (AP doesn’t require that its journalists disclose their Twitter handles).

“A lot of people ask about traditional journalism versus news over social media,” Carvin told The Content Strategist recently during a telephone interview, having just moderated a Society of American Business Editors and Writers panel about finding sources and stories through social media. “I don’t really see it as versus; I see it as connected.”

While social media provides up-to-the-minute information from around the world, journalists verify that information and place it in a larger context. “It’s important for professional journalists to bring their experience and judgement to bear on that content,” Carvin said.

In addition to finding news, sources and stories, Carvin said that social media can create a more intimate relationship between journalists and readers.

Although AP’s social media guidelines preclude its journalists from expressing “personal opinions on controversial issues of the day,” Carvin said the media company does not want to stifle its journalists’ online personalities. Instead he encourages AP journalists to blend their personal lives with their professional ones online.

Doing so, Carvin said, simultaneously broadens journalists’ readership and makes them seem like “something other than a machine, which is how you can come across tweeting strictly about your day job.”

In that vein, those tweeting on AP’s main Twitter account write their initials after each post. Carvin himself divides his Twitter posts between his job and his love of urban foraging.

In an attempt to increase the effectiveness of its online presence, AP will soon be offering online training programs in social media for its staffers, involving news gathering and engagement strategies. Carvin said that while many AP journalists have Twitter accounts, they represent a wide range of social media savvy and not all of them are aware of the best practices.

“The news organization that knows how to best use these tools could really thrive in this world,” he said.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently