Writing, blogging and social media posting for Thrive

Or, how to hit as many platforms as possible with your content

The Newspaper

Thrive is The Providence Journal’s Monday Features section, all about health, wellness and fitness.

Autopublished to Projo.com

Stories are taken from the newspaper and autopublished to the web. Projo.com then displays the articles in a slightly different manner.

We don’t stop there

Since 2008, Journal outdoors writer Tom Meade and I have also been blogging on the Projo Fitness Blog.

That content was used as a launching pad for Thrive, so we’ve kept it up, taking pieces of many of our Thrive stories and posting them on the blog.

Projo Fitness Blog

Other Web content

We also had projo.com video to go with the second part of that package: Tom Meade’s laughter yoga story.

Social Media

All of the headlines from Projo’s blogs appear on Twitter.

And Facebook posts are made for selected content.

Facebook is an option, too

Reader interaction

The final, and perhaps biggest piece of The Providence Journal’s content is generated by our readers. They comment on the web versions of the stories, blog posts, and can add their own video, photos and other links. They find us on Twitter and add their comments on the Facebook page.

Web comments

A story about an dog being euthanized generated 95 comments from readers in about a week.

Versatility is the name of the game

Today’s journalists have to be able to communicate on many platforms.

The story I write for the newspaper is more detailed, but it doesn’t offer me the ability to link or show video the way a blog post does.

How good are your headlines?

Social media affords me even more brevity: 140 characters for a tweet, and a snappy headline, photo and link for the Facebook posts.

Want to get more readers to your blog?

Create a Twitterfeed account (Twitterfeed.com) which automatically takes your blog posts and publishes them on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook

Facebook has an app for that

Some advice

Learn your trade First and foremost, it’s more important than

ever to be a good writer. We’re competing on so many platforms for our readers’ attentions that we have to grab them with our content.

Some advice

Then learn some more Be an expert in all platforms: Traditional

newspaper writing and editing, blog writing and editing, html code and web/mobile publishing, video production, audio production, and social media –– and of course, whatever comes next.