Social media can be a great source to find information, content, and sources to enhance storytelling. However, the information found on social media can be overwhelming but there are available tools to help investigative journalists.
Digital media specialist, Michael Salzwedel from Internews gave tips and tricks during the recent African Investigative Journalism Conference on how to use the advanced search tool, lists, real-time alerts and trend trackers to help journalists navigate through vast volumes of information, save time and find content.
The different tools:
- Journalists toolbox has a variety of resources to help journalists with research
- Open source and intelligence tools and resources handbook
- Tweetdeck is useful for journalists because it enables you to set up custom streams of tweets or notifications based on what you are researching or investigations
- If This Then That (IFTTT): Automates actions between different services for journalists, it can save tweets featuring specific content to a spreadsheet
- Hunchly automatically preserves websites and social media accounts. It easily categorises content while you build your next story
- CrowdTangle is a tool from Facebook to help follow, analyse, and report on what’s happening across social media. It is a closed tool, which means it is not available to the public, but it is available to researchers and journalists, it requires one to register, along with the news publication to have a registered Facebook page. The researcher or journalist does need to work with a recognised news publication to get access.
CrowdTangle is used to:
- Follow: Easily follow public content across Facebook, Instagram and Redditt.
- Analyse: Benchmark and compare the performance of public accounts over time.
- Report: Track referrals and find larger trends to understand how public content spreads on social media
CrowdTangle can also help publishers to improve content, discoverability and jump on trends.
Click here to watch the session
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