Social media is crucial to building a loyal following and is a great way to expand your readership and add voice to your blog. Though there are many different social media tools and strategies, at The Local we’ve focused in on the two biggest, Twitter and Facebook. Twitter: This is a place where we you spread content, reach out to other organizations and media outlet, and readers, and establish our voice. Don’t be afraid to be funny on Twitter and to comment on our content. First off, tweet your first post of the morning; at The Local we start with The Day, the morning link round-up. Make sure the tweet includes as many @’s at the organizations linked to in the post as possible. If there is a question in The Day (example: “what are you doing to stay cool? Tweet at us,” tweet that part of the day)—asking the question in an easy way to get @ replies. If you get a reply, re-tweet it. Schedule out tweets of the links in The Day for half-hour intervals through out the day. Be sure to @ at the relevant organizations. Link to their page directly (the link used in The Day, not The Day link). In order to schedule, download and install TweetDeck (or another app of choice) and create an account. Then add The Local’s twitter. You can also create lists in a Twitter client app, to watch, say food news, or local politicians. Sticking to a schedule for this (11:00, 11:30, 12:30, 13:00 – TweetDeck uses military time) creates a frame that you can tweet around for re-tweets or other oddities. This way the tweets are paced. Example. A story goes up at 12:18. You’ve scheduled links from The Day through 1...