Sharing information via social media has become a rote process for many newsrooms: They simply describe a story, copy and paste a link, and post.
But this requires mobile readers to trudge through content with multiple clicks and extended waiting periods, notes mobile journalist Neal Augenstein in a recent PBS MediaShift post. Augenstein describes a simple way to create what he calls an "ultimate tweet" for the smartphone and tablet audience. Here's how:
Build a photo montage
An inexpensive way to do this is to use the PicFrame app, which costs less than US$1 on Apple's iTunes or Android's Google Play. Using this app, you can import a string of photos from your phone's camera roll. "Having several pictures combined in a single tweet means the end-user doesn't have to keep clicking to see more than one picture," Augentstein notes. He recommends using no more than three images to keep the photographs large enough to see clearly.
Choose an audio-sharing tool
"The challenge is: how to allow the smartphone or tablet user to see the photo montage and hear the audio report, without requiring a second click on a link within the tweet," Augenstein wrote. He recommends adding audio with SoundCloud, an audio distribution platform that can be used on both Apple and Android. Users can upload full audio reports that can be shared with a URL on social media sites. (Check out IJNet's tips for using SoundCloud here). Augenstein also recommends AudioBoo as a SoundCloud alternative.
Combine audio and images
With SoundCloud's mobile app, users cannot upload both audio and images. However, to combine the two, Augenstein suggests uploading the multi-photo image as your SoundCloud profile picture. "This way, when a person clicks on your link, they'll see your photo montage and also be able to hear the audio report," he says. Unlike a video, Augenstein writes, the audio can play in the background while the user engages in other online activity.
Augenstein shares more about how journalists can create content for mobile users in this video:
To read the original article, click here.
Photo CC-licensed, courtesy of Yutaka Tsutano on Flickr