Finch release

Every so often justice gets served in a big way…a really, really big way. Charles Ray Finch was released from prison after 43 years for a murder he didn’t commit. Our faculty and students worked tirelessly to secure his release. Their perseverance was inspiring and reminds me why I enjoy working at this institution. You can read more about Finch, the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, and their work on his case here.

Our senior writer attended the hearing and was able to capture quotes and photos with her phone. Once she was back in the office, we worked together on how best to share the information on social media. Since this was such a huge deal and she had multiple photos and quotes, I suggested that we post a Twitter thread instead of a single tweet to really tell the story. To stay within our character limit, I put the quotes on the Twitter cards and used the rest of the text in the tweet. The result was a four-part thread that included quotes from Finch’s daughter, the clinic co-director, and one of the students who worked on the case. I pinned the tweet to the top of the page to get maximum exposure.

I took a similar approach to Facebook. I asked our writer to sum up the hearing with a pithy nut graph to use as the post text, and then I used the text from the tweets to caption the individual photos. The character counts on Facebook aren’t as restrictive as Twitter, so I didn’t feel the need to create graphics and let the photos stand on their own.

The last element to this social media blast was Instagram. I posted a five-card story and a post in our feed which prompted readers to check out our story to read the full article on our website. The Instagram story fell into place at the perfect time. I was about add a CTA to link to a local news story, but our writer had finished her piece right as I was looking for something to link to! ::wipes sweat from brow::