On Tuesday, October 29th, the SPJ DePaul chapter hosted a seminar titled “Facebook for Journalists.” Led by Chicago Tribune journalist Ben Meyerson, the seminar revolved around ways in which journalists can use Facebook to leverage their career and writing exposure.
The seminar highlighted the diverse functionality of Facebook and how those functions can be used to a journalist’s advantage. One example is the Facebook Search function and its ability to find almost any news article posted on the social platform. Let’s say you wanted to find a Chicago Tribune article through Facebook from August of last year to use as support for one of your current writings. You could use the search function to find this article by entering the page name and even the date of the post– making a wide range of journalistic information a simple search away.
The seminar even went on to mention tools that are used outside of Facebook but in unison with Facebook. An example of one of these tools would be the CrowdTangle chrome extension. What this extension does is allow you to go back to any published post and see how many views, likes, and shares it received via Facebook. This way you can see how much popularity your writings and general posts may have garnered– an important tool for journalists to see which of their writing topics work and which don’t.
A deeper understanding of Facebooks functionality will aid in better leveraging your success as a journalist and will aid you in discovering more ways you can continue to work toward a future journalism career.
Post by: Quinn White
DePaul University Society of Professional Journalists 