CASE STUDY
How The Mighty uses NewsWhip to understand social community around niche and special interest issues
Michael Mezzatesta,
Chief of Staff
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Industry
Digital Publishing
Company Size
50 employees
“Before we switched to NewsWhip, we were using CrowdTangle. NewsWhip gives a full spread across a variety of social platforms, not just Facebook.”
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CHALLENGE: How do you grow a tightly knit social community around niche and special interest issues — across audiences on every social platform?
Michael Mezzatesta is the Chief of Staff at the Mighty, a company changing the conversation around disabilities and disorders.
The Mighty is an online publisher aimed at creating content more accurately geared towards those with health conditions and disabilities. The Mighty’s content is unique in its ultra-niche, highly engaging nature — with social communities at the core of their strategy.
Today, the Mighty has over 1 million members, with their content viewed and shared over 90 million times per month.
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We were created as a media site for people living with health conditions to share their stories and connect with each other. Since then, we’ve been building out our site more as a platform to connect with one another.”
Michael says that the Mighty quickly understood that social media would be a main driver behind spreading their message and acquiring new users. Content from the Mighty is inherently shareable with its concentration on understanding those with illnesses and how to best address their needs, both institutionally and socially.
But the Mighty needed data that would help them better understand what content performed best on each platform, and how to leverage communities everywhere — not just on Facebook.
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We look at data from Google, NewsWhip, and the social platforms to measure our performance and stay ahead of the latest trends.
Social media is huge. It’s at the core of our strategy. I think the first half is making great content and the second half is getting in front of the right people — and social media is a great way to do it.”
The Mighty uses Spike to get in front of said people, by understanding what audiences on each platform are talking about today, and what their specific niche audience is predicted to care about. Using Spike, the Mighty can create content based on what their audience is already talking about, and what they know users will care about.
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Spike allows us to understand in real time what folks in our community are talking about. Spike is useful when we’re creating content every day to see what people are already saying about it, coming at it from a ‘The Mighty’ angle.
Our social media strategy is beyond just Facebook. We look at Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and it’s nice to have that extra variety within the platform.”
Spike is especially useful for the Mighty team because of its deep categorization of all stories and posts by topic and vertical. This way, the Mighty can dig into what stories are predicted to go viral or overperform in the mental illness, depression, disability niches, and more.
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In terms of workflow, it cuts down the need for daily lengthy conversations around brainstorming what we should plan for the day or the week — you can see what’s trending and decide whether to create content around it. It makes our brainstorming process more efficient. It’s a valuable tool to stay ahead of what’s trending, and to get your viewpoint into that conversation as quickly as possible.”
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