Journalists and educators learn innovative social media skills at NCTJ and Facebook seminar
Journalists, trainers and educators came together to learn innovative social media skills at the Facebook Journalism Project seminar 2018.
Journalists, trainers and educators came together to learn innovative social media skills at the Facebook Journalism Project seminar 2018.
Held at Facebook London in partnership with the NCTJ, about 80 attendees spent the day learning from Facebook, Instagram and CrowdTangle about how to use the platforms for meaningful social content.
Topics included video storytelling on Facebook, how best to use CrowdTangle for newsgathering and competitive analysis as well as exploring best practices for Instagram stories and IGTV.
Attendees also heard from Nick Wrenn, head of news partnerships EMEA at Facebook, about recent changes to News Feed and how the platform is working to combat false news.
Sarah Brown, Facebook’s training and news literacy manager, spoke about how to engage audiences and gather interesting news stories from Facebook Groups.
She said: “Groups are such an underrated resource for news gathering, whether it’s joining groups or creating a group to source or generate content.
“It’s wonderful to get journalists personally involved in Facebook Groups – you see the massive uptake in engagement because people want to hear their thoughts.”
She shared examples of Facebook Groups from publishers across the globe, to showcase good use of interaction, campaigns and sourcing news.
James Morgan, strategic partnerships manager for CrowdTangle, talked through his dashboard, showing the audience how it pulls together overperforming posts from all social media channels allowing users to track popular content in real time.
He announced that the platform, which is currently only available to publishers and brands, will be soon rolled out for journalism educators and trainers to introduce to students.
Andrea Willford and Kevin Kilpatrick, from Instagram, lead the final session of the day, discussing best practices on Instagram stories, the use of vertical video, IGTV and the latest features and tools.
Kevin explained that the key to a successful IGTV video was letting your personality shine through. He said: “Showing authenticity is really interesting to younger people.”
