Weather teams, Social News Desk takes the burden out of gathering your viewers’ weather pictures and moving them to broadcast. Here’s how.
#Hashtag
Successful user generated content starts with smart hashtag promotion. Ask your viewers to tweet their weather shots with your preferred hashtags. Maybe you have established hashtags, such as your call letters plus “wx” (#WXYZwx). Or perhaps you’re promoting a specific hashtag for a specific event, like #Flood2016.
Did you know that in your SND Dashboard you can call up a stream that returns tweets that use a specific hashtag? You can! Use “Search” in the upper right, select Twitter as your source and enter the hashtag. That’s it! Choose “Save as Column” and the feed will load on your Dashboard.
The Magic Part
So you promoted your hashtag and called up a feed of that hashtag for easy access to the files. Nothing
revolutionary about that, but here’s where the magic comes in. Click on the ellipsis in the lower right of any tweet in the stream and you can add it to a SND On Air playlist. Instantly.
Click that Add to On Air option and you can create a new playlist or add the image to an existing playlist. No messing around with saving the image to your computer, saving it in the correct file format for your display equipment to play back, no worries about aspect ratios – no tinkering.
Once your playlist is ready, you can easily call it up on your green screen. With a tablet in hand or with the help of your producer, you can pick and choose tweets to open in full screen to show your audience.
It’s a beautiful thing. SND Dashboard paired with SND On Air gives you the power to share user generated content on a daily basis, or for coverage of any major event. Make it part if your newscast every day. Talk to your newsroom management about how you can make that happen, or email us here, or just hit me up on Twitter.