Getting started with Social News Desk: A guide for newsrooms

For social media and audience teams, every day is a balance between short-term production and long-term strategy. Responsibilities include but aren’t limited to: scheduling story posts to various platforms, replying to comments and DMs, keeping an eye on the posting calendar, mining social media for news tips, staying ahead of changing algorithms and trying not to get exposed to too much traumatizing or irrelevant content.

Enter Social News Desk, an integrated social media dashboard that aims to help with all of these things. Unlike marketing-focused social media scheduling alternatives, Social News Desk was designed for local news organizations, co-founded by a former broadcast journalist and staffed by many former local journalists on the sales and customer service teams.

Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Attend a hourlong demo

The best people to attend the demo are the audience team manager and social media producer. Bring all initial questions about platforms, pricing, CMS integration and what’s on their roadmap that your team might use. Afterward, your team has access to a 14-day free trial.

Step 2: Integrate newsroom social media feeds

Connect your newsroom’s social feeds and invite team members who compose, manage, schedule and measure social posts. This information is not visible to anyone but the admin on this account.

Step 3: Post and schedule posts across Facebook, X, TikTok, Bluesky, Nextdoor

Now your team is ready to get the work started! Once your RSS feed is set up properly, all new stories can be automated or customized for publishing on your social media feeds.

Step 4: Customize dashboards for social media listening

Customize your dashboard using the social listening feature, which allows you to add profiles of competitors, sources and influencers you’d find helpful to track comparative performance.

Step 5: Check analytics and set up automated metrics emails

Review the reach and engagement metrics (likes, follows, shares) and audience interactions (direct messages, comments) for your social media accounts in SND’s dashboard. Schedule email reports to you, your team and any of your managers who could use regular social updates.

Is Social News Desk a good fit for your organization?

Choose SND if your newsroom:

• Has a budget of at least $100 per month for one person to manage and use this tool
• Has more than three social platforms on which your newsroom must maintain a robust presence
• Publishes several times per week, including features and evergreen stories
• Has social media producers who are experienced in (or would like to get experience in) social listening, monitoring social trends and newsgathering
• Your newsroom is generally focusing on top-level metrics from all social platforms

Consider alternatives if you need:

• A tool that costs less
• Three or fewer social platforms that need regular posting
• Fewer robust features, e.g. social listening
• A tool measuring a few published stories’ performance per week
• More robust analytics and insights across social platforms

Pro tips and known issues:

• Former client Science News loved SND’s ability to automatically schedule evergreen stories on weekends, though “we had issues with connectivity with our accounts and continually re-posting the same articles,” says Audience Engagement Editor Brandon Standley.
• SND’s data may require an extra step before it’s ready to share with your newsroom to answer questions like “Is this an average range for X this quarter, or are we underperforming?” More robust options, including Hootsuite, use competitor data over a range of time, which helps contextualize numbers for your newsroom, Science News’ Digital Engagement Producer Abby Wallace notes.
• For hyper-local reporting, Social News Desk’s Nextdoor feature allows you to view different neighborhoods in order to search for keywords, without a NextDoor account.

Social News Desk alternatives:

SND is on the robust end for similar scheduling tools. For smaller newsrooms with three or fewer social platforms, or publishing fewer stories per week, Buffer, at $18 per month per user, is a better start for research.

• 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 towards optimizing features, not news.

• Category: Getting Started Guides
• Tag: Social media management