We look at five steps to ensuring a closer relationship with your audience on social media.
This post originally appeared on the ENEX blog. It’s focused on broadcasters, but the principles apply to all publishers looking to harness social media effectively.
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Last week, we looked at the effects that mobile and social distribution have been having on all publishers, particularly broadcasters.
In this post, we’ll be looking at how publishers can optimise their digital content distribution channels to start connecting with their audiences on social media, and building up a loyal following.
Here are our top five steps, in social-friendly list format.
1) Make Social Part of Your Distribution Strategy
By tying in social as a means of getting your content distributed and read from the start, you’re laying the groundwork for successful social engagement. To ensure that social is a key part of your distribution process, look at your strategy up to this point, and evaluate its effectiveness in attracting new readers and viewers. Here are some starters:
- Carefully analyse your referral analytics to see what channels are driving traffic, at what times, and to what stories.
- Set some targets for social engagement over the course of a few months, and check how your closest competitors and publishing peers are performing.
- Identify social influencers with strong followings on social media that you’d like to see tweet or share your video or a link to your story.
2) Package Content for Social
If you have a story that you want to see shared to new viewers and readers, don’t rest at pasting a link onto Facebook and hoping that everyone stops scrolling to take notice. When looking to make the most of your social media accounts, make sure that you do your best ‘sell’ your stories.
- Think of new ways to tell and sell your story or video package on social media.
- Find ways of enhancing the ‘social lede‘ of your stories. Social ledes bring out the heart of your story in 140 characters or less, appealing to time-poor readers that might need a better reason to click on a link than just seeing a long hyperlink.
- Think about telling stories in ways native to social – whether that be by uploading short videos directly to Facebook, or curating media-rich Twitter lists.
3) Don’t Focus on ‘Going Viral’
Trying to come up with a plan to ‘go viral’ is not a social strategy.
Instead of pinning all your hopes on the virality of one story, ensure that all your content has the potential to be shared, tweeted, or even just passed on through Skype, or in an email.
Here are some ways of making sure that every story you publish has the capability to get attention on social media:
- Get editorial staff into the habit of asking ‘would I share this?’ Put time into testing headlines and social media copy.
- Optimise your share buttons and your site’s ‘share path’. Make sure it’s easy for your mobile readers to share, and consider what real estate buttons for different networks should be taking up.
- Put effort into selling your story on Facebook (see point 2), but also make sure you take the time to see what your story look like when a reader shares the story onto their own news feed.
4) Turn New Readers into Subscribers
Once you’ve managed to attract new viewers, you’ll want to make sure that they return to your content, again and again.
Social media sets lower barriers of entry for readers that might be interested in your content, which can be excellent in terms of attracting new readers, but also tricky when building loyal audiences. Some simple practices make it easier to capture floating social media users’ long-term attention. Here’s how:
- Make it easy for social readers to come back for more. Visual cues remind them of your social media channels, while experimenting with pop-ups and sliders is another way of capturing followers and fans.
- Make sure that you post regularly and informatively to your social media channels, using scheduled posts/tweets and audience targeting to maximise your visibility.
- Keep a close eye on your social metrics. Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics give you a better understanding of how your own posts are doing. More broadly, NewsWhip’s data helps leading publishers quantify their overall reach on social media in real time.
5) Keep an Eye on New Trends – and Experiment
Aside from the enormous distribution potential, social media lends a whole new pillar to digital storytelling. Whether that’s through sourcing eyewitness footage of breaking news events, or tapping engagement data to see what people are talking about, more and more publishers are starting to see social media as an input, rather than an output.
- Experiment with new channels. Some of these can be tied into social distribution, even if they are ‘dark’ channels. WhatsApp share buttons are now heavily used on many mobile sites, while there are growing numbers of users of other messaging apps, such as Line and WeChat.
- The wider roll-out of Facebook’s Trending feature, as well as a raft of new tools specifically aimed at aiding publishers is on the way. Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away‘ recap is also likely to offer new opportunities to publishers looking to get their content in front of eyeballs (along with their own new native video feature).
- More and more publishers are experimenting with ‘distributed content’, by producing content to be consumed within specific platforms. Eg – Facebook and Instagram videos.
With the arrival of Snapchat into content hosting, along with the steady growth of messaging apps, publishers are faced with lots of options on social. Meanwhile, livestreaming apps such as Meerkat and Periscope have been described as the ‘future of social television’.
Amidst this, it can be hard to focus attention. Ultimately, it comes down to the audience – their experience in engaging your content, and their willingness to return for more. Everything else is secondary. Remember that your newsroom is not the audience!
By closely watching what your readers and viewers are interested in, and how they’re finding and consuming stories, you’re doing yourself a huge favour in building your relationship with them.
