Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become part of a reporter’s toolkit. Yet research shows that media outlets and journalists tend to approach these Web 2.0 services with a 1.0 mindset.

In an attempt to help newsrooms, journalism professors Susana Herrera and José Luis Requejo have put together a list of 10 best practice guidelines for using Twitter…

For the guidelines, the scholars looked at the academic research on Twitter and studied the official accounts of leading news outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post and National Public Radio.

The 10 best practices they identified are:

1. Have a voice that is credible and reliable, but also personal and human
2. Be generous in retweets and credit others
3. Link to external material rather than simply broadcast your own content
4. Listen and respond to others
5. Provide information that adds value
6. Seek out the views of users
7. Promote the most interesting and useful content for audiences
8. Use hashtags created by the Twitter community
9. Include multimedia with tweets
10. Link to other networks where a conversation is happening, such as Facebook”

Source: Reportr.net