The use of Social Media for newsgathering is challenging, but suitable tools are needed to facilitate access to helpful information for reporting. This presentation provides journalists and news outlets with effective social media tools to source stories and gathers information differently.

1. SOCIAL MEDIA
NEWSGATHERING TOOLS
BASIC GUIDE TO NEWSROOMS

2. ❏ It is essential to understand how to find good stories, whether you're using Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, or any other platforms of Social Media.
❏ We can now listen in on millions of conversations happening in real time. This is where searches
for keywords come in — terms, phrases or hashtags used to discuss topics or events which can
help us identify what might be a good source for a story.
❏ And as your monitoring operation evolves, you will continually surface new and relevant
accounts.
❏ Social Media Monitoring: “is an iterative process that involves the constant collection of new
information relevant to the topics, sources and conversations you are tracking”
NEWSGATHERING AND MONITORING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

4. Twitter
ADVANCED SEARCH
Use Advanced Search to find the latest news and
world events faster. Find popular people,
hashtags and photos for any topic you can
imagine. You can even filter your search based
on Hashtags, Location or Languages.

5. Twitter
SEARCH OPERATORS
Almost anything on Twitter is searchable. There
is far more to Twitter search than the little
search bar in the top right corner of your Twitter
web interface. The Twitter search engine is a
mighty one.

6. TWEETDECK
Whether you’re a journalist or just interested in
news, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the
amount of information you can find through
this platform.
TweetDeck lets you see multiple timelines in
one interface, which comes in handy when you
need to monitor multiple accounts, discover
content and even build connections.

7. TWITTER LISTS
Twitter allows you to categorize news
within lists because news is popping up
each second, and it is challenging to keep
track of everything.
One of the easiest ways of finding relevant lists is
using Google’s advanced search operators
“Keywords” site:twitter.com/*/lists

8. FOLLOWERWONK
Followerwonk is a really simple way to check this information. Just go to the website, click “Search bios” in the top left, enter a
search term, then order the results by number of tweets, followers, following, account age or “social authority”. You can search
for certain words in the account’s name, location or URL field as well as the longer 140 character bio description.

9. TWITTERFALL
This one is a great tool that helps you to monitor specific keywords like “revolution”, “election”, “death” etc from
tweets in a specific language or in a specific geographic region. Twitterfall comes with an array of features that makes
it quite easy to know breaking news. All the related and necessary tweets fall into a special page from where you can
check it easily.

10. TRENDSMAP
Trendsmap is a Twitter trend tracking service that sticks tweets
onto Google Map, where users can sort by city or general region
and see trending topics in real-time.

11. TWEET BEAVER
Tweatbeaver is a home handy Twitter tools. You can search among keywords mentioned by
certain Twitter accounts, or locate conversations between two users, download a user's
followers list, and much more.

13. Facebook
ADVANCED SEARCH
While you may already use this feature, many
forget they can dive deeper by using the
advanced search bar. When searching for
something, click on “See all results” to filter
content to make results more specific. Users can
sort by date, group, post type and location,
among other filters.

14. Facebook
SEARCH OPERATORS
Facebook Search Operators are among the most
powerful search tools that we have at our
fingertips and can provide you with infinite
results within Facebook groups and pages.

15. CROWDTANGLE
Crowdtangle is a powerful tool from Facebook to help follow, analyze, and report on what’s
happening across social media. The tools helps publishers identify great stories, measure social
performance, and identify influencers. It's used by newspapers, television stations, digital media
outlets, investigative journalists, entertainment companies, sports teams and nonprofits all over
the world.

16. POSTPLANNER
The best way found to stay on point when looking for relevant content from Facebook is by not being on
Facebook at all! Instead, use the Top Content tool in Post Planner to discover content posted by other
pages/blog.

17. FACEBOOK “SIGNAL”
Facebook introduced the launch of Signal which allows "a free discovery and curation tool for journalists
who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy content across news, culture, entertainment, sports,
and more — all in one place.

19. LinkedIn
CONTENT SEARCH
Users will now be able to search by topic and
hashtags to find related content and
professional knowledge that’s been posted on
the social network by other members in their
feed or third-parties.

20. LinkedIn
PEOPLE SEARCH
Advanced People Search gives reporters and
researchers the ability to find the right expert at the
right time by narrowing the field of doctors, for
example, to those who specialize in spinal injuries,
as you'll see in the example above.

21. BOOLEAN SEARCH
You can run a Boolean search on LinkedIn by combining keywords with operators like AND, NOT,
and OR during your search.

23. YOUTUBE ADVANCED SEARCH
YouTube's search filters are your best friend when it comes to finding the videos you want. Pressing the
"Filter" button under the search bar will provide more options, allowing you to fine-tune results either by
upload date, type of result, video duration or specific features, and then sort the results in a different ways
as well.

24. Feedly
With Feedly, you can subscribe to Youtube channels as sources. New
videos will show up in your feeds when they are published so you can keep
up with your favorite YouTube channels alongside everything else in
Feedly.

26. SEARCHMYBIO
If you are searching for particular kinds of people or accounts you can use a tool like SearchMyBio,
which allows you to search for keywords within accounts’ bios.

27. PICPANZEE
Picpanzee offers a cleaner and sharper way to search people on Instagram, providing a list of associated
hashtags in a separate column

28. GRAMFEED
GramFeed allows you to conduct and manage
searches across the Instagram photo platform.
It has some functionality to allow for very
targeted research around user-generated
images.

29. PHOTODESK
A native Mac app, Photodesk is a powerhouse for
content discovery within Instagram, while also
acting as a content publisher to the platform. The
tool allows you to perform the standard Instagram
functions of sharing, liking and commenting, but
with the ability to search for content by keyword,
tag and username. But one of the more impressive
features of Photodesk is the ability to search by
location, and create a geofence around that
position.

31. Google
SEARCH OPERATORS
A professional journalist should keep a closer eye on Boolean
search operators, which are “And, Or, Not, “”, ()”. These terms
and marks are significantly important when you want the
search results to be relevant, filtered, and specific. These
operators deliver the message to the search engine whether you
need to know “all” about what you typed, or “one of them”, or
you want all search results to “include” a specific term or name.

32. GOOGLE TRENDS
Google Trends allows you to be
updated with the latest most
common searches on the web
so you are updated with what
interests the audience.

33. GOOGLE ALERTS
Google Alerts sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper
articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term.

35. REDDIT
Reddit is one of the world’s largest social news aggregators and discussion boards. Referred to (by
itself) as the “front page of the internet,” it is a trove of online discussions and potentially
newsworthy material.
TRACK REDDIT
Tools like Track Reddit let you
monitor the whole of Reddit for
certain keywords, although it is only
free for the first two.

36. Reddit
SEARCH OPERATORS
You can always learn more on how to use Reddit
keyword operators for a more effective search.

38. SNAPMAP
Snapchat introduced Snap Map, showing the locations of publicly posted material in a heatmap,
but not showing the user who posted it. Newsworthy footage is occasionally posted to the map.

39. OTHER NEWS GATHERING SOURCES

40. HASHTRACKING
HashTracking provides useful insights on
hashtag patterns

41. STORYFUL
The Storyful Multisearch extension
helps you quickly query keywords
across Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr,
Instagram and Spokeo, in the
comfort of your own browser. Simply
click on the extension, enter in your
search term and the extension will
open up new tabs for each social
network showing the the search
results in each.

42. CURRENTS
Currents is a free tool that shows the attention of over 1 billion people each month and 850,000 viewed articles each
day. It enables publishers to see which topics are performing the best in news sites around the world. It also shows the
keywords that people are using to search the content and how those topics have performed historically.

43. BUZZSUMO
BuzzSumo can help with
assessing “most shared”
content and related trends.

44. NEWSWHIP
NewsWhip allows you to
monitor and filter news shared
across social networks in one
platform. You can find out what
is trending in different parts of
the world, or in a particular
niche.

45. SOCIAL SEARCHER
With Social Searcher, there are three different search tabs allowing you to search for mentions, users, or trends. When
you enter a keyword to search for mentions, the tool will surface the most recent mentions of that keyword across all
major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

46. BRAND24
With Brand24, you can monitor major social media platforms as well as blogs, forums, and other sites for mentions of
your brand, product, key topics, or competitors. In addition to delivering real-time information about your mentions,
the tool analyzes your social media interactions, sentiment, and more.

47. THANK YOU!
By: Alaa Mahmoud

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RESOURCES