Using social media to find leads on my story

For my story on a breast cancer awareness event last week in Manhattan Beach, I was hoping to gain more insight on other similar events in the LA/OC area. So I called out for help to my dear Facebook community:

This status update went unnoticed in hundreds of news feeds. Even after an entire day, I didn't receive a single response. So I decided it was time to try something new. Facebook's new Question application has been around for a few weeks now, and I thought there was no better time to test it out than now:

I got this response from a UCLA student within a few hours of posting the question. She proceeded to inform me about a rally that will be held this Thursday at UCLA.


I also tested out my Twitter community, but without much luck. Because I don't actively use my account, I don't have many followers, and even with the hash tag, my tweet got lost among the bunch.


So instead, I decided to branch out and try using twitter's relatively new feature that allow me to search mentions of a specific topic in my local area. I thought that was really helpful.