How the WSJ has doubled its Twitter followers

Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab writes about how various news organizations run their social media.

Here is what Allison Lichter, Wall Street Journal social media editor, told him:

The WSJ social media team writes every tweet that goes on the main @WSJ account. We run a 24/7 global social operation with social media editors in New York, London, and Hong Kong; all of the members of our team are journalists who are expected to be excellent writers and exercise great news judgement. We see the @WSJ account as a “front page” of The Wall Street Journal on social media: offering our followers the latest breaking news, as well as a thoughtful mix of in-depth analysis, features, and, importantly, direct audience engagement. We value the intimacy and immediacy that our @WSJ Twitter account offers to our followers and we know from our data and from Twitter’s own analytics that tweets that are written manually, rather than being automated lead to greater engagement, which is ultimately our goal.
In addition, our followers have doubled every year for the past two years:
In July 2012: 1.5 million
June 30, 2013: 3 million
May 2014: 4.4 million
We also think our manual feed heightens accuracy and prevents errors, since writing tweets ourselves keeps us accountable for them in a way that an auto-feed would not.
While our major accounts (@WSJEurope, @WSJAsia, @WSJD for example) are run by editors, the Journal does have several sub-branded accounts that are automated. We have encouraged our reporters and editors around the globe to take ownership of those accounts and, at the least, create a mix of automated headlines and manually written tweets. Because we know images help drive engagement, we have encouraged editors to include images in their tweets, which has had the effect of reminding editors of the importance of publishing great visual content to accompany their written stories. In addition, we created a “social headline” field in our backend publishing system that provides a social-friendly headline that can be shared by readers who come to our article pages and that feeds some of our automated accounts, so that the automated headlines, when used, are as engaging, direct and conversational as possible.