Juan Manuel Gaitan,
Product Manager
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Industry
Publisher
Company Size
500+ employees
“Spike saves me two hours a day – everything I need to know is in one place and I know how it’s performing.””
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CHALLENGE: How can small, regional newsrooms draw big engagement on social?
For a neighborhood publication like QNS, engaging their niche audience in Queens is at the heart of their brand. The news site is targeted exclusively at connecting and captivating the next generation of Queens residents.
Though social media is pivotal to the success of the stories QNS publishes, Editor-in-Chief Katarina Hybenova tells us how they struggled to harness it with a tool that would cater to their regionally specific needs and small team.
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Social media is the alpha and omega for QNS. That’s where our community is and that’s where we can reach them. Social media, primarily Facebook, is of utmost importance to us as far as content distribution goes.”
QNS needed a way to tap into the full power of social platforms, while sifting out exactly what would be relevant to their local readers.
Spike has given QNS a one-stop source for discovering content that will resonate with Queens natives – spurring story ideas for the newsroom, and benchmarking their engagement and performance. Spike ranks the stories relevant to the QNS niche by their popularity and likelihood of going viral – allowing Katarina and her team to know what topics will perform well before devoting resources.
“
Spike is the second website I click right after Google Analytics to see if we’ve met our goals. I distribute the story ideas [I get] from Spike to my team via Slack and we get to work.
Many times I discover stories that other outlets reported already, but from a different angle – Eater NY might mention that an ice cream shop opens in Flushing, and while it’s not big news for them, it gets thousands of hits at QNS.”
Not only does Spike save countless discovery time and simplify performance stats, its ease of use makes it an invaluable tool for any size team and newsroom.
The results? No question as to whether QNS is doing all they can to produce the best content for their New York neighborhood.
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Thanks to Spike, I feel well informed about what is out there. I’d say Spike saves me two hours a day – everything I need to know is in one place and I know how it’s performing.
[Spike] really is a must tool at this point! I’m glad that a small organization like ours can benefit from cool technology that was previously only available to bigger organizations.”
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