Reuters holding personal finance conversations on Twitter

Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Reuters.com executive editor Dan Colarusso about its social media strategy.

Here is an excerpt of what Colarusso said:

Until four or five months ago, we only had social media for [Reuters.com] out of New York. We hired Jamillah Knowles to be deputy social editor out of London, to keep us starting a conversation earlier around stories and to give us a truly global feel. That’s one part, just expanding how often we’re actually manually active on [social]. We’re pitching stories forward and putting stuff out that’s not on an auto feed. It’s engendering conversation.

The other thing we’ve done — we haven’t done it in hard news yet, but we’ve done it in personal finance here in the States — is Twitter chats with readers and our wealth team. Lauren Youngruns them out of New York, and we do one a month right now. We’re thinking of expanding that to news and other issues.

I think the way [engagement] was being done, the game had passed it by. We’re in a unique position to put a fine point on engagement. I consider us to be in the age of engagement right now, in the sense that our social thrust has a very specific plan behind it. Rebuilding our CMS and tweaking our article-level pages is about engagement.

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