Five Tips to Help Plan Your 2015 Social Strategy

We list some practical tips to help get your social strategy off to a strong start in 2015, from creating content for social, to making subscribers out of new readers. 
Throughout 2014, we kept close tabs on the way that publishers were reaching new readers on social media.
Social isn’t the only way of reaching new readers. For instance, many publishers found significant distribution success through email in 2014, a seemingly old-fashioned medium.
However, social media remains one of the best ways of directly reaching new audiences, whether you’re a major news site, a technology company, or a specialist publisher. We saw this clearly last year, with niche sites directly reaching new readers on Facebook and Twitter more than ever before. Regional publishers such as the LA Times, the Metro and even the Manchester Evening News frequently had stories go viral in our Spike dashboard, reaching readers that would have never otherwise clicked into their stories.
Meanwhile, more and more brands pushed their content marketing through social, leading to impressive direct engagement with fans on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more.
In 2014, we saw the likes of FIFA and Disney make impressive gains in our monthly social rankings, which are usually dominated by more traditional publishers. By directly posting content that their target audience feels connected with (in Disney’s case, posting mock-ups of Disney characters’ Instagram profiles, for FIFA, live-blogs of World Cup games), they managed to capture attention in spades.

At the end of the year, we noted some publishers that performed particularly well on social over the previous 12 months. For 2015, we decided to gather some of what we learned into a post, to help get your social strategy off to a strong start.
Here are some areas to consider when approaching your social strategy for 2015.

1) Make Social Part of Your Distribution Strategy

By tying in social as a means of getting your content distributed and read from the offset, you’re opening your potential reach infinitely. To ensure that social is a key part of your distribution process, look at your strategy up to this point, and evaluate its effectiveness. Here are some starters:

A. Look carefully at your referral analytics. What percentage currently come from social? What type of posts, media, and calls to action perform well on different platforms? Do you know what your most effective posting time is, and if you’re stimulating a conversation around your content?

B. Identify social influencers with strong followings on social media that you’d like to see tweet a link to your story. Give yourself a goal in posting your content: would this campaigner, celebrity or industry expert share this with her followers? (Tip: Many of our clients use Spike’s Influencers’ feature for this very purpose.)

C. Set some targets for social engagement over the course of a few months, and check how your closest competitors and publishing peers are performing. Check in on our monthly social rankings, or drop us an email for more granular data on how you’re performing on social.

2) Package Your Content for Social

If you’ve put time into creating a campaign for social, or crafting a story that you want to see shared to new readers, don’t rest at pasting a link onto Facebook and hoping that everyone stops scrolling to take notice. When looking to make the most of your social media accounts, make sure that you do your best to promote your stories.

A. Think of new ways to tell and sell your story on social media. While a screenshot of a particularly captivating paragraph on Twitter mightn’t lead to everyone clicking through, it’s definitely going to attract more retweets, thus extending its reach.

B. Find ways of enhancing the ‘social lede‘ of your stories. Social ledes bring out the heart of your story in 140 characters or less, appealing to time-poor readers that might need a better reason to click on a link than just seeing a long hyperlink.

C. Think about telling stories in ways native to social – whether that be by uploading short videos directly to Facebook, or curating media-rich Twitter lists. ‘Distributed content’ looks as though it will become a more common fixture in 2015, so some brainstorming is a good idea. A small investment of time could lead to big returns.

3) Don’t Focus on ‘Going Viral’ 

One thing we’re learning from our monthly data is that big viral hits aren’t the easiest way to maintain a consistently strong showing in the monthly rankings on Facebook and Twitter.
One metric that many of our data clients look at closely in Insights is the average share/tweet/comment rate per story. For instance, while the BBC has a better overall tweet rate each month, tech site The Verge has more success at getting more tweets for each of its stories.

Getting a story to go viral can bring a fantastic boost to your traffic, profile, and social followers. However, it’s an effort that works particularly well when combined with a consistent content strategy, which ensures that your new readers click through and share other stories on your site.
Instead of pinning all your hopes on the virality of one story, ensure that all your content has the potential to be shared, tweeted, or even just passed on through Skype, or in an email. Here are some ways of making sure that every story you publish has the capability to get attention on social media:

A. Consider if your stories will work well on social from the outset, and understanding what it is that your audience is interested in reading about, or watching. Ask ‘would I share this?’ Put time into testing headlines and social media copy.

B. Optimise your share buttons and your site’s ‘share path’. Make sure it’s easy for your mobile readers to share, and consider what real estate buttons for different networks should be taking up. Try making your charts and images shareable, or particular quotes from the body of the article.

C. Put effort into selling your story on Facebook (see point 2), but also make sure you take the time to see what your story look like when a reader shares the story onto their own news feed.

4) Turn New Readers into Subscribers

Once you’ve managed to attract new readers, you’ll want to make sure that they return, again and again.
Social media sets lower barriers of entry for readers that might be interested in your content, which can be excellent in terms of attracting new readers, but also tricky when building loyal audiences. Once they’re signed up, readers don’t have to enter email addresses, or any personal details to follow your Twitter feed. It’s a simple process, and one which publishers should be taking advantage of. Here’s how:

A. Make it easy for these readers to come back for more. Visual cues remind them of your social media channels, while experimenting with pop-ups and sliders is another way of capturing followers and fans.

B. Make sure that you post regularly and informatively to your social media channels, using scheduled posts/tweets and audience targeting to maximise your visibility.

C. Keep a close eye on your social metrics. Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics give you a better understanding of how your own posts are doing. More broadly, NewsWhip’s data helps leading publishers quantify their overall reach on social media in real time.

5) Keep an Eye on New Trends – and Experiment! 
Of course, it’s not all about distribution when it comes to social. Social media lends a whole new pillar to digital storytelling, whether through sourcing eyewitnesses to breaking news stories, or using Reddit to connect with fans and customers.
In 2014, we saw how news organisations were experimenting with the likes of Snapchat in telling their stories, while brands continued to use Twitter to source positive feedback for their products. By closely watching what your audience is interested in, and how they’re finding and consuming stories, you’ve done yourself a huge favour in bolstering your relationship with them.

A. Experiment with new channels. Some of these can be tied into social distribution, even if it is ‘dark’. WhatsApp share buttons are now heavily used on many mobile sites, while there are growing numbers of users of other messaging apps, such as Line and WeChat.

B. 2015 is sure to bring another round of interesting developments on Twitter and Facebook too, with the wider roll-out of Facebook’s Trending feature, as well as a raft of new tools specifically aimed at aiding publishers. Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away‘ recap is also likely to offer new opportunities to publishers looking to get their content in front of eyeballs.

C. Watch how publishers adapt to ‘distributed content’ – producing content to be consumed within specific platforms. Eg – Facebook and Instagram videos.

Here’s a quick flashcard summary of these steps:

If you have any social strategy tips of your own, we’d love to hear them. Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter.

What Next?

1) Trial Spike for free to find powerful stories for your content in 2015
2) Join our weekly newsletter, read by 8,500 media professionals