#socjournalism

An MOOC from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas - registration opened today!

The five-week course Social Media for Journalists: The Basics will begin February 3 and end March 9, 2014.

Understanding social media, how it works and how it can benefit journalism has been a rarity in newsrooms around the world. This course aims to provide journalists, media practitioners and the general public with knowledge about finding and distributing news and information in social media. Students will be introduced to common platforms, techniques, and ethical considerations.

A random thought for this morning:

Facebook's business plan, like that of most online companies, is based on selling its user data to advertisers. To succeed, it must do everything it can to encourage users to share as much data as possible.

News organizations and other businesses with Pages are not users. We are potential advertisers whose posts often discourage users from sharing information on Facebook. Business Pages regularly share links to other web sites that take users off Facebook entirely.

Therefore, it's in Facebook's best interest as a business to discourage Pages from sharing links. From a broader business standpoint, it's also in Facebook's best interest to limit the reach of Pages maintained by businesses that do not advertise. Those of us who oversee Pages for businesses have found that happening over the past several months.

I'm not hating on Facebook for this. It's business.

In response, businesses that want to be successful on Facebook should adjust their strategies to treat the social network as a subscription service. Budget money to pay for Like ads every month. Like ads have the greatest ROI, which is understandable. They serve to promote use of Facebook.