Digital News Production Unit- Creating our Online Presence

Today our group decided to create and solidify ARMA News online presence by creating various social network accounts and becoming active on said accounts. This is something that many news corporations do in order to get their news out to the public in as many different ways as possible.
With the evolution of online social media, news reporting has becoming quicker and easier, and with the creation and distribution of mobile phones and data plans and internet access wherever we may be, news reporting has become almost instantaneous. As such, it is important for these news corporations to be able to spread news at any time of the day and from anywhere.

We decided to follow this trend and created our own Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. This should allow us to spread our news online effectively as well as add smaller stories which although may not be broadcast worthy, have enough strength as a story to warrant a short article on one of those social networking accounts.

Of course, when it comes to creating an online presence, it is important to take branding into account so that there is a consistent appeal for our product throughout all our social networking account. Therefore, I picked up Adobe Photoshop and created some banners and profile pictures for each of our accounts.
Here is a screenshot of me creating a banner:

I made sure to keep in with the colour scheme we had chosen for our network, and incorporated the globe from our news intros into the banner.

When creating this banner, I took inspiration from some of the BBC News promotional images, such as this one:

Of course, I made sure to keep with our colour scheme and include our news name. Once this banner was completed, it was assigned in different variants to all our social networking accounts. you can see them in action here:

The ARMA News Youtube banner which includes links to other social networking accounts.

Our ARMA News Twitter Page

On each of our social networking accounts, we also made sure to upload some of our production shots to give our viewers something extra. They can see our greenscreen set up, which is an incentive for them to follow our social networking accounts. 

You can visit our accounts at these links:

https://www.youtube.com/user/armanewstv

https://twitter.com/news_arma

https://www.facebook.com/NewsARMA?fref=ts

Personally I am very happy with the way our social networking accounts are looking physically. I feel that our branding in terms of logo and colour scheme are very strong, and I also believe we have taken the right steps into becoming a legitimate online news entity.

If I could change one thing about where we are at so far, I perhaps would have created the online social networks a little earlier into the project so that we could have uploaded more material to drum up hype for our eventual news launch.