Local TV news is enamored with Twitter right now.  That’s good - but - are you missing an even bigger way to connect with your viewers?    Are you interacting with your viewers by texting?   My informal research shows few local TV news station are using this very popular social media tool in an aggressive manner.   Sure - your station may have people sign up for weather and news alert texts - but what about daily conversations?  What about an interactive relationship?

Check out the numbers.   Pew research shows about 11% of American adults use Twitter.  That number is around 20% for those aged 18-to-34.  But only 10% of those aged 35-44 use Twitter, and the number falls to 5% for those 45-to-54-year-olds.

An Online Harris Poll shows less than 5% of the American population has used Twitter.    A Harvard Business School study projected that most Twitter users send one Tweet in their lifetime!

Compare those numbers to Text messaging.  Nielsen Mobile research shows that 18-to-24-year-olds text an average of 790 messages a month - compared to making 265 phone calls on their cell phone.   Nielsen says the numbers for everyone who owns a cell phone - covering young people to the older crowd - show that they send 357 text messages a month compared to making 204 cell phone calls.  Those are huge numbers.

So my message is this - make a big push to begin a texting relationship with your viewers that goes beyond the occasional news or severe weather alert.  Your reporters and producers should be sending out short - very short - one or two sentences at the most - updates to viewers throughout the day.  You get them to opt in to this service - the same way that you got them to sign up for the news and weather alerts.

This texting relationship will also turn into a two-way communication as your viewers begin to let you know about traffic delays, breaking news etc.   Yes, it may be a little more difficult to set-up than Twitter - but it is a “target rich” environment.   It is a segment of social media that you cannot afford to ignore. 

Jim

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.