How KOMU used Social News Desk to break news, monitor community activity
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KOMU is a large broadcast and digital news organization in Columbia, Missouri, staffed by full-time faculty affiliated with the University of Missouri, and around 100 students working in the newsroom. The digital team serves their local community through social platforms, primarily Facebook and Instagram.
“The goal is to get [our audience] to see us as a reliable source of news on Instagram, and follow up and tune into our newscast,” notes Jacob Richey, digital content editor for KOMU’s news operation.
If your newsroom maintains a regular presence on several social platforms, regardless of the number of people managing that work, Social News Desk should be on your radar.
Importantly, it has a paid subscription model totalling at least $100/month per user, so a budget is necessary. Free or lower-cost (but less robust) alternatives are listed below.
Three reasons to use Social News Desk
- A centralized dashboard for posting, scheduling engagement and monitoring direct messages across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, BlueSky, NextDoor and more.
- Shared content calendar allows for multiple team members to schedule posting across platforms, including their own link sharing version of LinkInBio (Newsin.bio) for Instagram and TikTok, which allows you to create a landing page link on your newsroom’s profile that displays links to recent stories posted in your feed.
- Social media listening allows team members to follow profiles of competitors, sources and influencers on their beat and get basic analytics on how their competitors’ posts are performing.
Newsroom overview
KOMU has a full-time broadcast and digital staff of 15; they cover local news in Columbia, Mo., on local television, website and social media.
Every semester, about 100 journalism students work across the newsroom, either as an assignment through their classes or on an extracurricular basis. Depending on their educational background, student staffers can work on digital production, copy editing, audience development, reporting, TV production, production assistants and anchors.
Problem: High staff turnover, sharing logins
With high turnover across teams every semester and different students working in the newsroom each day, KOMU managers face the challenge of establishing clear workflows that don’t need a lot of handholding. It also needs tools that are secure across multiple logins and easy to manage across different users.
Richey shares that KOMU also wants an efficient way to connect news production to audience and community feedback, including potentially newsworthy social activity from local agencies and sources.
Solution: Assigning as-needed seats on Social News Desk
Social News Desk has been established for years in the KOMU newsroom, allowing the digital team to quickly monitor metrics from their posts across social platforms, schedule posts in a shared calendar, and monitor performance with defined top-level metrics, including reach and engagement.
Previously, as a digital producer, Richey spent half an hour or more checking agencies and other official sources to flag any newsworthy updates for breaking news teammates. Since using Social News Desk’s social listening feature, he shares that the process now “takes 5 minutes. It’s way easier to integrate newsgathering, which has now passed to my digital producers.”
Social News Desk offers tiered pricing on an annual or monthly basis, depending on how many users your news organization will need, starting at $99 per month up to $199/month for annual plans and $149 to $249 per month. These tiers include varying levels of access to features, such as social search and listening and a consolidated inbox for all of your direct messages across social platforms.
It’s not the most inexpensive social dashboard tool out there, but it is robust enough if your newsroom has to maintain a presence across many social platforms. It can save time for audience producers who would otherwise have to track social media accounts individually, or missed opportunities in engagement while collecting and comparing metrics. SND also offers a 10% nonprofit discount.
Impact: Breaking news before competitors
Nine months into his managerial role, Richey is working on understanding the metrics over time using SND across his team. He highlights a particular story that wouldn’t have happened without the tool.
In a recent story, the victim in a local shooting was reported as being in critical condition. Minutes after KOMU’s Facebook received a direct message from a source confirming that person had sadly passed, Richey’s team was able to confirm it and update the story. “We might have gone off of the police report that that victim was in critical condition, like our competitors,” Richey says. “But we had a leg up, and can keep tabs on the community.”
Similarly, newsrooms covering breaking news can customize their dashboard to constantly update with posts and topics that can then be mined for newsgathering, or get more context on what’s already been reported. Setting up a dedicated experiment with Social News Desk for as little as 14 days (the free trial period) can show the difference that feature can make.
One of the primary concerns Richey had was meeting the needs of his staff, who consistently change per day. This situation may also apply to editors who primarily work with part-time or freelance contributors. Managers can see an overview of scheduled content across platforms and how previous posts performed, informing future strategy and patterns of what kinds of stories resonated with community members.
Security and privacy
“I really think SND works for us, to allow a lot of people to access a single social page securely and efficiently,” Richey says. With the newsroom staffed almost entirely by students, he expects turnover every five months. “[SND] allows us to not worry about sharing logins and get access passed onto the next person.”
Social News Desk meets a high security compliance standard, using Single Sign-On (SSO) to prevent unauthorized logins. All social platforms are integrated by an administrator-level manager in the newsroom, and the tool allows access and permission for all team members without having to reveal the passwords for any integrated social platforms.
Also worth noting is SND’s keyword alert feature, which helps monitor the newsroom’s social platforms for unruly users using profanity or exposing personally identifying information. Newsrooms can also customize the alerts for particular users or images.
Verdict: A good tool for newsrooms with shifting teams
One of the primary concerns Richey had was meeting the needs of his staff, who are constantly changing. This situation may also apply to editors who primarily work with part-time or freelance contributors.
Managers can see an overview of scheduled content across platforms. They can also gauge how posts perform, informing future strategy on delivering stories that resonate with community members.
Setting up a dedicated experiment with SND for 14 days (the free trial period) can show the difference that feature can make.
Social News Desk alternatives
While there are a variety of tools that can help newsrooms do any number of newsgathering or engagement and production on social media platforms, these three are comparable to Social News Desk.
- Hootsuite: a similar all-in-one integrated social dashboard.
- Pro: much more customizable for power users and for newsrooms with robust audience teams.
- Con: more expensive per user
- Buffer: a collaborative social scheduling dashboard that publishes to SND’s social platforms and more, including YouTube Shorts, Pinterest and Mastodon.
- Pro: much lower pricing per user, starting at free and $5/month — a huge savings for one-person audience teams.
- Con: you’re limited to three social platform integrations and 30 social posts per month.
- Nuelink: a customizable social media dashboard that allows users to schedule hundreds of posts across platforms.
- Pro: an AI integration that helps social media producers brainstorm different optimized copy per platform, and a pricing plan that starts at $18/month.
- Con: designed for marketing agencies, so there will be features that lean toward optimizing features, not news.
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