A Q&A with Huffington Post Canada’s Community Manager

Huffington Post Canada’s Social Media Editor, Ron Nurwisah, tells us about his workflow, and how the site is approaching audience development and social media.

What’s your role at Huffington Post Canada? Can you describe a typical day’s work for you?

I’m the Community Manager for HuffPost Canada. My typical work day is a mix of a few things:

• Checking our social networks for stories that have performed well. We do this to give our editors a chance to learn about content and techniques that are working.

• Keeping up with best practices. Facebook, Twitter and other platforms are always in a state of flux so it’s important that I’m on top of them and can communicate changes to our team.

• Making sure that the posting cadence on our main accounts are up and that our bests are the best that they can be.

• And I spend time on any special projects that we might be working on.

Of course, if a big breaking news story happens, this all goes out the window and I’m assisting our editors and writers on social media, writing stories, etc.

What kind of content is performing best for you on different platforms? Do you find dramatically different interactions on different networks?

It’s no secret that video has been huge on Facebook, so I’ve been working with our video team on creating video content geared towards that social network. We’re also experimenting with video on Twitter. Twitter is interesting because it has so many different ways to get video on the platform (Vine, direct uploads, Periscope) the challenge is finding things that fit in with our editorial workflow and stories that we’re working on.

What metrics are you interested in when looking at the success of a story? In particular, what kind of engagements do you look for on Facebook?

Traffic is obviously important. But I’m actually happiest when we craft a post to get stories, photos and comments from our readers. We have a very engaged readership and we often turn their contributions into another story. For example, last year we asked our readers on Facebook and Twitter what was “the best thing that happened to them in 2014”, we got dozens of baby photos, wedding portraits and really touching stories.

I love making these genuine connections with our readers. I think it makes us a bigger part of their lives and more than just another news outlet that they’re clicking on.

Are you experimenting with any new platforms or distributed content? If so, what have you learned from these experiments?

We’ve been pushing hard on Instagram. It’s early days but we’ve learned quite a bit from day to day use of that app. The one thing that has struck me is just how positive the community on the platform and willing to give their time and share their photos with us. We’ve started a project, Canadagram, that profiles a prominent Canadian Instagrammer each week and it’s been a great way to meet the many different communities that exist on the platform and get introduced to some great Canadian artists in the process.

We record the Huffington Post as consistently being one of the leading publishers on social media. What makes HP content shareable?

Each editor on HuffPost is trained to craft their stories for Facebook and Twitter (and any other social networks they want to share to). On Twitter, for example, we write each tweet that goes out. On Facebook we stress writing great status updates, picking the right photos, etc. I stress to our team here that we should be spending as much time crafting our social media posts as we do picking our webpage headlines and photos.

We’re also constantly refining these best practices and studying what works. I think the best part of my gig is that I have a team here in Canada that really gets social and shares ideas with me constantly and also that I have this group of social media editors from around the world who are constantly thinking about best practices. It’s like being on the social media Avengers or something.

How is the Huffington Post Canada using Spike?

Spike is pretty much indispensable for our editors now. We use it to identify stories that could go viral and stories that we might miss. Our trends editor Jesse Ferreras explains it like this: “It’s a key part of my daily scan, and I regularly refer back to it to figure out what’s trending on an hourly basis.” He also points out that it’s crucial in figuring out where to devote our resources. We can use Spike to see how a particular story is trending before deciding to write it up or ignore it.