Is your content going to be a hit or a miss? Here’s how you can discover the stories to make your content champions.
There’s a lot of noise out there. In just one minute, Facebook users like posts 4.1 million times, 347,000 Tweets are sent, and 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. So how can you ensure that it’s your content that your audience is engaging with?
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The Internet is more than cats, right?
You probably have an idea of what your target audience likes and your most popular content themes. But what’s popular can change in an instant, and a compelling story idea might quickly become yesterday’s news if you don’t move fast enough.
In this case, slow and steady doesn’t win the race. Here’s how we discover the content from sites that are ‘punching above their weight.’
Discover the Content Your Users Will Love
How do you find the stories that are resonating with your target audience, right now? Social media insights can help us discover the content that is getting people reading, sharing, and engaging.
This can be done by tracking your target audience’s interests, their geographic location, or even just the big stories that you know you can put a spin on.
In NewsWhip Spike, our Over-performing feature uncovers statistical outliers, so that we can quickly identify content as it becomes viral.
Take a look at this curated Spike panel, sorted by Over-performing stories across Facebook and Twitter. The panel is focused on US publishers in the past three hours.
For a story like the one at the top, published on Medium, to go viral at a rate of 10.53 times the amount of Twitter engagements, it has to be a big deal. And the announcement of Vine shuttering their mobile app is certainly news.
But we can get more niche. For many publishers, your audience might have specific interests that can be overshadowed by bigger stories. With curated panels set to Over-performing, we can surface them.
This panel focuses on uplifting news, so for a publisher with that as their focus, this is where to find the stories that are really resounding with their target audience.
The first story, about a baby with Down Syndrome, performed 6.53 times better on Facebook than US Magazine’s average performance. By keeping an eye on the stories that are doing extraordinarily well for your target audience, you can keep ahead of emerging content trends and successes.
Own Your Big Hits
With social media being paramount to distribution, checking which of your content ends up ‘over-performing’ is a smart way to see the content creating your big hits.
For trivia publisher Mental Floss, two of their top over-performing hits in the past 30 days were related to geeky niches like Lego and Star Wars. They can use Spike’s export feature for a full analysis on which trends were the content superstars of the whole month.
You can go for a competitive analysis as well. Are stories around the same topic over-performing for other publishers in your space? We can even drill down into individual Facebook pages, to see what native content does best.
This is a week’s look at the top over-performing Facebook pages of travel magazines, showing what stories really resonated with readers.
The top post, on becoming a Canadian citizen, shows Travel + Leisure’s adeptness at subtly tying in the American election season to their own travel content. Other travel publishers might choose to do the same — look at those bigger global stories and find a travel-themed way to add to the conversation.
Create Content with Intelligence
So why do we want to identify the over-performing content, the heavy hitters? Let’s sum up:
- Benchmark your own content to find your big wins
- Look at your competitors to see which stories are doing well for them
- Discover the stories that will over-perform for your target audience
With so much digital noise, you need content intelligence to find the stories that your readers will appreciate. This is vital whether you are a publisher, a PR professional, or a brand marketer. By finding the stories that will best serve your audience, you continue to build trust, awareness, and a hunger for more.
