Developing "social media strategies" - creating the position of social media editor, for example, and trying to enforce their presence on social networks - is something that many news organisations have recently started to do. In a very short amount of time, with the speed that characterizes new technologies, just any approach to social media is not enough. It needs to be the right one.

Companies have been born to provide "social media solutions for newsrooms", as Social News Desk does, and some newspapers are refining their strategies, like the Guardian, which has recently started to go niche on Facebook, offering pages for different sections of the paper.

At the basis of the Guardian's strategy is the belief that even if not everybody is interested in all the content coming from a publication, many might be interested in specific topics.

This strategy has something in common with the Facebook strategy the UK's Independent is developing.
As Poynter's Damon Kiesow reported, Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, has experienced a notable rise in his popularity on Facebook, reaching more than 13,000 "Likes" since mid-January. This is particularly interesting when you compare this to the 39,000 "Likes" the publication's primary account has gained in about a year.

As recently reported, the Independent has been looking at different ways to make its content more accessible on social media. Digital media editor Jack Riley said that in order to allow people to specify their interest more precisely, the paper now allows readers to "like" individual journalists or subjects.

Analysing Fisk's rise, Kiesow underlined two main reasons: first, the Middle East is a hot topic nowadays and secondly, the Independent's use of the Facebook "like" button to push specialized content to users seems to be working.

In a recent lecture Riley described it this way: "Imagining your digital audience thinks in terms of publications is a physical media hangover; real units of human affection are not aggregated by staples", the article reported. "The more targeted the content, the more likely the reader is to find it relevant and to share it with friends."

In the process of the topic-based "likes", when readers click on "like" button it is connected to a hidden Facebook page, visible only to an admin. Using an external service, All in 1 Social - the article says - the newspaper pulls a custom RSS feed containing related news which updates are sent to users who have liked the page.

"We have given them (the readers) the ability to hone in on what they like," Riley said, "and they are responding."

Sources: Poynter, Editors Weblog