OPTIMIZING YOUR NEWSPAPER’S SOCIAL PRESENCE



If you imagine your community as akin to the wheel of a bicycle, you want its newspaper to function as the all-important hub with spokes radiating both out from, and into, the center.

The name of the game, of course, is to get folks to connect with your journalism, to communicate with your reporters, to seek out your stories and ultimately to boost the bottom line.

In the age of social media, editors and publishers are preoccupying themselves with finding the best ways to promote their products, using an assortment of online platforms. There are those who believe, in this push, they may be neglecting more traditional avenues for attracting readers. But more on that later.

Tim Shoults, VP of Content and Outreach Development for Glacier Media – a publicly-owned publisher of B.C. dailies and weeklies, operating since 1988 – has been focusing on how to generate clicks on Glacier newspapers websites.

He works with staff at newsrooms across Western Canada “to try to reach their audiences in any way their audiences want to connect with us, be it in print, online in social media, by carrier pigeon or smoke signals!”

Through experimentation and observation, Shoults has determined the online vehicles that are being used to greatest effect. He finds that Facebook is winning the social media competition hands down, driving the greatest volume of traffic to newspaper websites.

Shoults himself did not join Facebook until 2007 but, within two years, was “a Facebook addict.

“I’ve been a strong advocate for social media engagement for newspapers. In no time, we’ve seen social media go from generating a negligible portion of our total web traffic in a one-month period to generating as much as 70 to 80 per cent of the traffic.”

Indeed he says his own research shows that, consistently, 90 per cent of social media traffic, as it affects the community newspapers, derives from Facebook, with the other 10 per cent emanating variously from Twitter, Reddit, Linked in and assorted Commenting platforms.

The stories that get the most “shares” are the ones that trigger emotional responses, “ones where those reaction emoji are actually used” by the readers.

Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg has found a way to make money from the desire of websites to attract additional traffic by way of his social media site. Facebook now offers a “Boost Post” icon that can be clicked — whereupon Facebook will work its magic for a fee that varies according to the number of people to be reached and how long the boost is to persist.

Not worth it, says Shoults. His own experimentation with the Facebook Boost pointed to spending of $10 to generate $1.80 in ad revenue.

As for Twitter, Shoults personally is a big fan. But he finds it nowhere near as effective as Facebook in generating traffic to the newspaper websites.

He says, only 1 per cent of the newspapers’ readers are even on Twitter. He believes Twitter is, for the most part, “inside baseball,” where journalists love to interact with their peers, or with civic leaders and politicians.

In the end, “the audience that we really see that draws traffic to our websites, the only place where our community newspapers can make significant revenue online, is through Facebook”.

U.S. Blogger Richard Henderson writes that newspapers, in their advertising and promotion materials, would be wise to capitalize on the Facebook benefit by including a “Find Us On Facebook!” tag on all promotional and advertising material, and including an appropriate link. The message also should be featured on business cards, promotional emails and receipts.

Social marketing is wonderfully effective, Henderson insisted in a 2015 Hiveage blog post. “There’s a reason why [US] marketers will spend $8.3 billion on social marketing in 2015.” But he cautions, patience and dedication are required to fully exploit the new platforms, “because it takes a strong presence and a large following to see results.”

For all the potential benefits of social media, everyone knows the story is complicated. As much as the new platforms can drive traffic to newspaper websites, they collectively constitute daunting competition for traditional newspapers. We all know about those young people who look at you cross-eyed if you ask them which dailies or weeklies they read. They no longer bother with traditional media or even glance at their websites. They get their news in a million different ways, online.

Shoults characterizes the relationship between traditional and social media as one in which the two forces act as “frenemies”.

Social media “is both one of our principal sources of audience and one of our principal competitors for advertising revenue, as it becomes a dominant self-serve platform for small and medium-sized businesses as well as major brands”.

(Advertisements on social media, as they appear on newspaper websites, are also presenting some challenges. The interactive features in those ads are a turnoff for readers who may not want to suddenly encounter an intrusive audio-visual message. It is far easier for readers of traditional newspapers to just ignore mercifully silent ads that do not interest them.)

Use of social media to generate interest in traditional newspapers remains in the experimentation stage and not much research material yet exists on the subject. The full range of benefits and pitfalls clearly are still being discovered.

One possibly unexpected benefit of social media may be in its ability to reintroduce the newspaper to those who have written it off.

Chances are, people who may have stopped reading the newspaper, either in print or online, will read a traditional newspaper story online if someone the individual respects or is close to has ‘shared’ the story, thus presenting the newspaper with a valuable opportunity to reengage that lost customer.

And of course, newspapers’ online presence provides new opportunities for journalists to engage directly with readers — by asking them, for example, to Comment on stories, or “Vote” on issues. The Globe and Mail’s interactive outreach includes the occasional hosting of hour-long webinar-style chats with reporters on key topics in which the readers can directly put their questions. Newspapers have begun using Podcasts as a storytelling tool.

Some believe the key to success in adapting to the social media sphere may be in making it a team effort. In 2011, ABC News, with a centralized social media team of three, held 12 two-hour training sessions to familiarize all its employees with social networking tools like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

They discussed why the sites are important for traditional media and how to use them. The key message was that social media was to be a shared responsibility within the organization. This was a smart strategy to get everyone up to speed and pulling in the same direction. Too many newspapers just assume their employees will adapt by osmosis to new-media ways.

The objective for publishers and editors going forward obviously will be to take full advantage of those benefits social media offers while not neglecting more traditional, and highly effective, methods of boosting community relevance, methods that have worked in the past to attract citizens to the newspapers’ pages.

Newspapers have always been fairly cunning at promoting citizen engagement. Many have sponsored subtle public campaigns which may not directly result in increased traffic on a newspaper’s website but have proven worthwhile in helping the community embrace the newspaper’s brand. Of course, social media can be effective in reinforcing and publicizing these more traditional branding efforts.

Postmedia runs a Raise-a-Reader fund-raising campaign in 13 communities across Canada, to support literacy programs locally. Obviously there is an aspect of altruism to the effort, but also longer term self interest in the promotion of reading; readers are potential newspaper readers.

The Vancouver Province, in partnership with United Way, since 1918, has been operating an Empty Stocking Fund to collect donations, particularly at Christmas time, for charities serving disadvantaged children, singles and families in B.C.

The Vancouver Sun Run helps anchor the Vancouver Sun in the community. The tremendously popular springtime 10K run has ballooned, from 3,200 entrants back in 1985, to 43,372 in 2016. Organizers in 2014 added a charitable component to the race. The high-profile event, which operates training clinics for the public and has a wheelchair-run component, provides a heap of publicity and generates a ton of goodwill.

During election campaigns newspapers often book venues to host live public debates and community discussions to quiz party candidates, debate hot local issues, generate buzz and inevitably augment their own relevance.

We have come a very long way from when people delivered news by carrier pigeon or smoke signal. But these days it feels a lot like newspapers, looking to maintain their place in the community, have begun a whole new journey into a fast-changing and challenging landscape.

Key Messages

• Social Media, particularly Facebook, is invaluable in enhancing the social presence of community newspapers.
• It is not sufficient to address social media challenges by appointing a single social media coordinator. Training sessions for staff increase employee comfort levels with the online platforms and ensure all hands are on deck and pulling in the same direction.
• Social media should supplement rather than displace more traditional public relations vehicles that help grow a newspaper’s profile in the community.