Last month, Vadim Lavrusik, the coordinator of Facebook's new journalism program, called Facebook a "newspaper of the people". His speech at Columbia's Social Media Weekend came a few weeks after the launch of Facebook's Journalist page, and media sites have been buzzing about Facebook's potential as a journalistic resource since.

The speech echoed much of what is published on the Journalist page, which demonstrates how journalists can reach Facebook users and build a fan base.

Lavrusik attempted to explain Facebook's advantages as a social media resource. Twitter remains the preferred social media site for journalists, but all communication is limited to 140-character posts.

Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore wrote a lengthy post on ways for journalists to attract more traffic to their work. Using social media to communicate with readers and sources can help maintain current audience and attract more, she said.

Her advice could be summarised with one word: "engage". Reflecting on personal experience, she offered practical advice for journalists.

Using Twitter, unsurprisingly, is critical, she believes. For example, she advises journalists to let their sources know about stories, as they may spread the word by retweets. This can drive significant traffic to the article - particularly if the sources have a substantial Twitter following.

When tweeting about stories, including the Twitter handles of people who might be interested in them can be helpful. They might retweet the link, giving the story further exposure.

If other news sites have already written on the topic your article is about, it's a good idea to link to their articles. It could also be worthwhile to include those sites in a tweet about the story as it's always possible that they retweet it.

Outside Twitter, Tenore advised to comment on articles that have been written about the topic your story is about. A link to your article should be included in the comment, of course.

Twitter will be announcing its move into the realm of photo-sharing services this week. The Guardian speculates that this could be Twitter's attempt to monetize the company, as Twitter has not yet achieved a commercial model.

In an effort to rejuvenate the 108-year-old paper's look, the South China Morning Post has completely redesigned its layout in both in print and digital formats. INMA reported that the new format is meant to appeal to the readers in today's multi-media society. The format changes are not a last resort of a failing paper: the newspaper's print readership has increased by double digits in the past few years.

The New York Times' has been conducting a Twitter experiment: use people instead of automation.

This week, the newspaper's Twitter account is run entirely by social media editors who handpick stories, write tweets and engage with readers, Poynter reported. Normally the account features only occasional contributions by social media editors, consisting mainly of an automated headline feed - a "cyborg".

Turns out, the readers have regarded this kind of impersonal web presence as "mostly an RSS feed of auto headlines," said Liz Heron, a social media editor at the newspaper. According to her, this week's experiment "is about changing the perception, and it's about being a little more strategic about what we put out there -- finding the most engaging content."

Poynter's article pointed out that the results of the so-called "experiment" are in fact fairly predictable. According to The Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward, "human-powered feeds do much, much better than automated ones, by any relevant metric." Unplugging the automated feed could be less about trying out a different approach, the article speculated, and more about convincing management that social media presence is enough important to invest in.