How the Wall Street Journal beats competitors on social media

Christopher Ratcliff of Econsultancy writes about The Wall Street Journal‘s strategy of engaging with its readers using Twitter and Facebook, resulting in more followers than rivals Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.

Ratcliff writes, “WSJ was the first to break the story of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death on 2 February and during the course of the evening the WSJ website experienced major technical difficulties.

“Heron and other reporters claim to have answered as many of the thousands of users’ questions as they possibly could within a fairly small window of time, and did so from their personal Twitter accounts.

“Although I would criticise the fact that WSJ doesn’t seem to engage with its Twitter followers and Facebook commenters as the above above quote suggests. There’s very little engagement to be found scrolling through the last two weeks of output.

“It seems WSJ has nailed how to broadcast effectively on social media, but isn’t quite practicing what it preaches yet on the ‘human touch’.”

Read more here.