Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

So how can you keep up-to-date with all the latest and breaking social media news without sacrificing too much of your time?

In this post, we’ll share some tools, tips, and tricks to help you stay up to date with social media news in just 10 minutes a day.

“In a world where we had control of such things,” Tom Jolly, the associate masthead editor at The New York Times, told me in an email, “we’d break the big stories early in the day, when more people are online.”

This dynamic is, in a strange way, a throwback. As Matt Pearce, a national correspondent for The Los Angeles Times pointed out in a string of tweets Wednesday night, “it's like we’ve bizarrely returned to the era of the evening edition.”

The news alert that The New York Times distributed to readers’ cellphones Wednesday night. About one hour after Times readers received a news alert Wednesday night, The Washington Post notified readers of its latest scoop.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, the evening edition was the newspaper you grabbed for your commute home from work. Because it was published in the afternoon, it was the best way to get the most up-to-date news in print. After all, by the time the work day ended, that day’s morning paper covered events that had taken place at least a full day before....

Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a deep disdain for your trade.

Here are some tips from Russia.Vladimir Putin’s annual pressers are supposed to be the media event of the year. They are normally held in late December, around Western Christmas time (we Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas two weeks later and it’s not a big deal, unlike New Year’s Eve). Which probably explains why Putin’s pressers don’t get much coverage outside of Russia, except in a relatively narrow niche of Russia-watchers. Putin’s pressers are televised live across all Russian TV channels, attended by all kinds of media — federal news agencies, small local publications and foreign reporters based in Moscow — and are supposed to overshadow every other event in Russia or abroad.

These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook.

I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader....

Opinary has its own newsroom that creates editorial polls, which can then be integrated into a news site in place of comments. Behind the scenes, a data science team tracks the opinions of more than 25 million monthly users and reflects their results to publishers and readers. Currently, Opinary has partnerships in Europe with The Times, The Independent, Huffington Post and others.

In January, Simon Galperin joined Opinary as their U.S. head of growth. His goal: to identify how to maximize social impact in coordination with publishers and journalism networks like the Institute for Nonprofit News, Solutions Journalism and Reveal.

We talked with Galperin about how to measure engagement, reinvented....

On a platform like Facebook, the combination of self-identification from users and algorithmic response to stories that start getting shared heavily, means that there’s lots of room for opinion stories to reach wide readerships.

For many large news sites, strong opinion stories on issues of the day, or from recognised names, can result in major engagement boosts from users sharing a story that identifies with their views, or by weighing in on the comments section.

To understand how opinion based stories contribute to Facebook engagement for large sites, we took a close look at the role of Op-Ed content in driving engagement for two major general news publishers.

Using NewsWhip Analytics, we can specify any domain we want to analyse, as well as the category that we’re interested in looking at on the site. In this case, we zoomed in on English-language Opinion articles from the New York Times and the Guardian, to get their numbers for the month of December 2016....