Social Media Roundup In USA

Automated tweets get less engagement than handcrafted ones, WhatsApp is making inroads at a USA Today sports site, and sometimes all you can do when a years-old piece takes off on Facebook is shrug.

It's been a good week for gleaning insights from media outlets, which seem increasingly willing to share which social strategies are working for them. Here's a rundown of recent social media news you might have missed.

Human tweets > RSS tweets

Los Angeles Times social media editor Stacey Leasca shared some tips on Twitter's media blog this week.

Among her insights was the fact that moving from RSS tweets improved engagement. It's no surprise that a human touch makes a difference, but it's interesting to see how much the change seems to have increased the rate at which the newspaper's accounts are gaining new followers

A perfect example of this is, again, @LANow. We moved @LANow off of an automated feed in the summer of 2013. The account was then staffed by editors and reporters working in the section. They are our real local experts and the Twitter account quickly became richer with information and much more personal for Angelenos. @LANow quickly went from averaging about 1,500 fans a week to more than 2,500 fans a week.

I've noticed Times tweets generally seem very by-the-book, to the extent that the occasional tweet with a human flair seems jarring (the tell is that they're written down-style instead of up-style, as Times headlines are). The Wall Street Journal, perhaps its chief competitor, has embraced pictures and charts on Twitter, and is much more conversational at times. The Journal also liberally retweets its reporters. It's fascinating to see how much the two newspapers — still somewhat staid in print and on their websites — diverge when it comes to social media.

Ryan Osborn, NBCUniversal News Group vice president of innovation and strategic integration, echoed most of the other outlets' reasons for choosing not to automate social media posts: "While scaling a strategy 24/7 has taken time, we’ve found that engagement is greater when the accounts are manually curated."

After Facebook's acquisition of the messenger platform in February, I wrote that WhatsApp could become a useful tool for "dark social" content sharing — in other words, an alternative to email for sharing links privately rather than publicly. BuzzFeed had already started experimenting with a WhatsApp button in stories on the mobile Web.

Now, Digiday's Ricardo Bilton reports that USA Today's viral, mobile-friendly sports site, FTW, saw 18 percent of its mobile sharing activity come from WhatsApp in its first week of using the WhatsApp share button. That's more than Twitter.