Whether you have a dedicated communications staff member or team, or you’re doing it yourself, creating and sustaining engagement takes up valuable energy and time. If you’re unsure as to where you should devote most of that energy in order to maximise your news engagement, you’re not alone! The goal posts are constantly moving in terms of social media platforms and other avenues of engagement, so we’ve done our best to round up your options and explain how you can measure your engagement on each.
Email Newsletter
We’re starting with the preferable option for engagement here. If you’re really serious about engagement, consider that the average reach through email marketing is around 20-30% (based on open rates) versus 6% on social media (organic reach). Click through rates are also up to six times higher than social media, and with algorithm unpredictability and the limitations of control on social media platforms, prioritising your email newsletter just makes sense. A well planned EDM release schedule with a dedicated audience can maximise your engagement and return on investment. Regardless of what platform you use, getting news directly to your audience’s inbox will always have more impact than hoping it appears on their feed (at the precise moment they’re paying attention).
You’ll generally find that your email marketing software has robust analytics – Mailchimp has a particularly user-friendly set of analytics tools available straight from the Campaign Dashboard to see which subject lines get the most opens, and how your links are performing. A quick online search for “[Your Platform] analytics” will give guides on how to find and understand your newsletter metrics, and get on the right track to increased engagement.
For further details on how to start a newsletter for publishers, read LINA’s blog post here.
Website
Once users have actually made it to your website, you will still want to know how many users are viewing your website (unique views are a handy metric), how long they stay reading your posts, and how they’ve made it to the website. Installing Google Analytics will make this process much easier, but can take some setup. You’ll need access to your hosting service to make Google Analytics work for you.
WordPress has a range of non-Google plugins available to track analytics, and many other platforms have native tools, so you can get to work on having a track record of your website’s successes. Use these in your media kit to demonstrate engagement to potential advertisers!
Podcast
Podcasts are an exciting prospect for smaller news organisations, and allow you to direct energy and resources to a dedicated audience. Growing this audience can be difficult at first – your most useful engagement tool will be listeners themselves, whose ratings and reviews on podcast platforms (as well as word of mouth recommendations) will get your offering out there. Don’t be afraid to ask over and over for listeners to subscribe, rate, and review – it’s the best support they could give!
Your engagement analytics will depend on where you deliver your podcast. Google Podcasts has an excellent Podcast Manager and you can build and deliver your podcast directly through their systems. Similarly, Apple Podcasts offers Analytics for creators.
Social Media
It used to be a social media marketing staple, but with Facebook turning away from news and continuing to restrict unpaid content, it may no longer be a sustainable option. If your local audience is active on Facebook, consider starting a Group where you can post content directly to your audience. This has the advantage of notifying group members when you post something new (as well as nurturing a community atmosphere), but it also means taking the time to moderate posts and comments from other group members (and implement a consistent social media policy).
If you’re continuing to use a Facebook page, there are a number of ways to measure your engagement. Facebook’s Professional Dashboard isn’t the most inspiring experience, but it gives basic information on your post metrics and audience demographic. The more robust Meta Business Suite gives more detailed insights on your engagement across a timeframe, shows benchmarking against similar pages, and gives suggestions for increasing engagement. Paid content makes a marked difference, but there has been some evidence to suggest that unpaid content gets further restricted once you’ve started paying Meta to expand your reach.
YouTube
For news groups posting videos to YouTube, the native metrics analyser YouTube Analytics is a great tool to see your overview, reach, engagement, and audience. You can view your subscriber growth rate, which is important for sustained engagement, and see which videos prompted viewers to subscribe. You can also see when viewers are closing your video to get an idea of your most valuable content, and what parts of your videos could be made more engaging (or dropped).
Make sure you have a call-to-action strategy for your YouTube videos: Do you want viewers to subscribe, to go to your website, or something else? Keep a targeted message and let the audience know why this action is important to you and how it supports independent local news in your area.
Be aware that when you upload content to YouTube you retain ownership and copyright of the material, but you are giving YouTube and other users a Licence:
By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable licence to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, modify, display and perform it) for the purpose of operating, promoting, and improving the Service.
TikTok
This short video app doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon; in fact, it seems that younger audiences are increasingly getting their news and local information through TikTok. You’ll find some of the big news producers on the platform, producing bite-sized content for a younger audience. If that’s a direction you’ve decided to go down, make sure you set up a business account so that you can access the native TikTok Analytics. To change your account type, tap the TikTok menu and go to Settings & Privacy > Manage Account > Switch to a Business Account . Just be warned – the average CTR (click-through rate) is pretty low at around 1% for non-paid Tiktok videos, so you won’t get a lot of conversion to your main site, newsletter, or feed.
In the available analytics (find these through Creator Tools), your most useful engagement metric will be under the Followers tab. Find out your follower demographics, the days and times they’re active, and what tunes you might want to add to your videos based on their likes. Combine this with your most liked and viewed TikToks, and you’ll have a good idea of how to increase your engagement on the platform.
This platform has been used successfully by news organisations over the past few years (see BBC News’s success story in amassing over 200 million followers) and can drive on-platform engagement as well as site referrals. Instagram success depends on professional, eye-catching visuals and writing that can tell a story quickly, so don’t try to make an immediate transition with your existing content. Utilise tools like Canva to develop regular Stories and use a link sticker to send viewers to the full story.
To find and make use of Instagram’s native analytics, you’ll need a Creator or Business account. Then just head to your profile on the mobile app and tap the Insights button. Scrolling down to the Content You Share section will give you the best insights about your most successful posts and stories, which links are followed, and which kinds of content led to viewers accessing your profile or (even more importantly) following your account. Analyse what works about this content, and use that knowledge to improve the engagement on all your future posts and stories.
X
What can we say? It’s impossible to know how things will pan out for X, but it’s best to be cautious. The platform is currently highly unregulated, high risk, and unstable – and they have recently moved to a default algorithmic timeline which requires users to change over to a chronological feed of their actual followers. In terms of priorities, it might be time to move X down the list. If you love the X style, some news organisations are moving over to Mastodon – while we don’t know how well this will take off (particularly in Australia), it might be worth a look.
However, there are still native analytics tools which you can access through X Analytics, and you might want to use this data to influence your social media approach across other platforms. You’ll be able to access the same kind of insights we’ve mentioned earlier – focus on post engagement to assess your most valuable content and delivery style.
Ask your audience
Besides analytics, you can get great feedback from your audience using direct email input from readers, surveys, and polls. Be sure to have a clear plan of what you’re asking, and how you can use that feedback to improve your news offerings. There are a number of different online services you can use for these strategies, like BeOp, Jotform, Google Forms, and SurveyMonkey.
The main takeaway? Analytics and audience feedback are vital in understanding how to increase your engagement across any platform, and while you might not have time to maximise your impact across all platforms, choosing the right two or three for your organisation will help streamline your efforts and keep your audience in the one place, rather than scattered across multiple under-performing platforms.
We’ll have some more resources coming soon around newsletters and surveys, and are working on an analytics tracking solution for members.
