Reactive storytelling can create viral wins for brands on social. Reebok’s Dan Mazei shares the secret formula to creating a nimble, strategic brand newsroom.   

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Challenge: How can legacy publishers grow into new verticals and engage expanded audiences?

MTV has been a household name and cornerstone of music industry news for nearly four decades.

As the MTV News team explored expanding into new markets while maintaining positions in legacy ones, they needed to ensure they kept the trademark MTV voice consistent at scale.

To meet this challenge, MTV signed up for NewsWhip Analytics to stay deeply in touch with what content is working in their industry.

Renan Borelli, Director of Audience Growth and Engagement at MTV News tells us how NewsWhip Analytics gives him the comprehensive view of content performance across his entire sector.

Renan leads social and audience development initiatives for the MTV editorial team. Managing a trove of social editors and strategists, his main goal is optimizing MTV writers and editors’ content for reader engagement.

“Metrics are the only way to figure out what’s consistently resonating with the audience we’ve built. Ultimately, our main goal is to make sure we’re getting our work in front of the right audience, wherever they might live.”

But which performance metrics to focus on? And how to track them? That’s where Analytics comes in. With the insights NewsWhip Analytics provides, MTV News can understand why certain content plays well with its existing fanbase, and play off of those formats to reach a wider range of readers.

“Having performance metrics contextualized against outlets we respect allows us to communicate metrics in a way that’s informative and relevant.

We use the NewsWhip Analytics platform to see what’s working for other publishers as part of the internet as a whole – but it’s also just as important for us to track success on an apples-to-apples basis.”

With billions of interactions happening on the web each day, the NewsWhip Analytics platform gives him the power to see which publishers, articles and influencers are resonating at any time.

Specifically, Renan’s team uses the data gleaned from Analytics to hone in on the music and pop culture publishers that are producing similar content, while benchmarking against their own performance metrics.

This gives MTV News the ability to both compare their social engagement across a wide sector and drill down to get intel on emerging trends.

“We also use NewsWhip Analytics to see how the work we’re doing stacks up. A lot of the focus on web analytics is self-examination – But I also care about how other publishers may have covered the same topics.

If eight websites all covered the release of Beyonce’s surprise album Lemonade, which was the most engaging piece? Which drew the most shares? What had the best distribution?”

NewsWhip Analytics offers the most comprehensive dataset on social distribution and performance. It has allowed Renan’s team at MTV News to fully analyze their performance and strategy against hundreds of thousands of publishers and brands.