The Dose - by Patrick Thornton on Thursday, March 19, 2009 16:59 - View Comments

Daily Dose of social media: Facebook now a better beatblogging tool

Nielsen: Twitter’s growing really, really, really, really fast –There is no excuse now not to get on Twitter. It’s going mainstream. Months ago, you could be forgiven for dismissing Twitter for not having a large enough audience to be worth your time. But Twitter is growing rapidly and millions of people will join the site in the coming months.

Twitter grew 1382% year-over-year. That’s amazing. It had less than 500,000 users a year ago! Now it’s rocketing towards 10,000,000 and who knows how big it will be next year.

Get on board the Twitter train. Choo-choo!

10 Great Social Sites for Resume Building — We’re all probably going to lose our jobs anyway (especially journalists), so you might as well polish up that old resume. And if you are actively looking for a job, you’ll appreciate these sites:

Creating the perfect resume is not easy. Luckily, there are a number of online resources dedicated to helping you create outstanding traditional and social media resumes. Here are 10 great social sites with unique features that let you create your own resume-like profile, edit your resume online, get it reviewed by experts, print it, share it on social networks, and much more.

You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should — It’s true, the new Facebook design is all about brands. Pages no longer suck. Facebook is trying to go head-to-head against celebrity Twitter pages, because they know those pages drive traffic.

The new Facebook design is great for journalism organizations. Facebook used to be a so-so tool for journalists and journalism organizations, but now Facebook can be a powerful brand-building tool.

The new pages operate a lot more like individual profiles do. They are much more interactive, can be updated much more often and they are more like Twitter. Twitter has become a powerful brand-building service, and Facebook wants a piece of that pie.

A few months ago, I would have told that Facebook wasn’t the greatest social network for news organizations and journalists. The new pages feature changes that.


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  • http://thoughtscream.wordpress.com James Chen

    Twitter’s growth does beg the question of how many of those new accounts are corporate PR tricks. Spam still sucks at 140 characters per post.

  • http://savethemedia.com GIna Chen

    I truly believe Twitter — or something like it — will eventually be as ubiquitous as e-mail is today. The fact that Facebook has changed itself to better compete with Twitter says it all.

    With that said, I still find so many of my friends and colleagues are not convinced of Twitter’s value. Can be frustrating at times.

  • http://beatblogging.org/2009/03/30/daily-dose-of-social-media-facebook-rapidly-adding-users-especially-over-35/ Daily Dose of social media: Facebook rapidly adding users, especially those over 35 | BeatBlogging.Org

    [...] journalism should at least play around with Facebook and understand why it is so popular. With its new design and rapid growth, Facebook should be a very appealing network for news [...]

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About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.