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Why media companies need to act as community hubs in times of crisis

When a global emergency strikes, panic, dread and hopelessness can quickly settle in throughout the world, worsening the quality of life for entire populations. And lately, it seems as though people have had to face one never-ending crisis after another.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs forecasts that 274 million people will need humanitarian aid and protection in 2022 alone.

What many media companies don’t realize is that they have the power to help some of these people in times of crisis. In fact, media companies can offer significant support to populations simply by acting as online hubs for communities to gather during an emergency or tragedy.

Why the importance of community intensifies during a crisis

During stable times, online communities bring like-minded people together, encouraging meaningful connections to form between active members, which grows loyalty toward the host brand.

Meanwhile, the value of hosting a safe online community in a crisis goes far beyond growing brand loyalty — giving audiences access to a tight-knit community can reverse declining mental health and support them in their time of need.

“[If] community members let their feelings of fear, anxiety, confusion, and dread grow unchecked during a crisis, they will most likely begin to feel hopeless or helpless… [causing them to] be less motivated and less able to take actions that could help themselves,” writes the CDC in a crisis and emergency risk communication manual. “Helping the public feel empowered and in control of at least some parts of their lives may… reduce fear.”

So by providing people with a safe space to join an active community, your organization can allow people to feel more in control and confident during a chaotic period. Here’s why:

Offering stability in a world of constant change

From global warming disasters to the war in Ukraine, economic, social and ecological conditions worldwide are unstable.

Online communities encourage members to check in on their conversations regularly, giving people a sense of routine or stability.

“Routines can create a positive level of stress that keeps us focused and may avoid some of the depression that many people may experience as a result of… isolation, fear and uncertainty,” explains Ramon Solhkhah, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Jersey Shore University Medical Center.

Ultimately, chatting with fellow community members frequently can help to give life meaning, make people feel more productive and improve mental health in a time of uncertainty and fear. Any media company can deliver this type of experience to audiences simply by giving people access to safe community social spaces.

Shaping safe online spaces for sharing thoughts and opinions

Media organizations that give people safe digital spaces to meet and talk empower users to share their voices, thoughts and opinions around whatever crisis is at hand. This can help spark social change and heal traumatized or struggling community members.

According to a series of researchers around the world, “[online] communities (OCs) offer the ground for breeding activism as they provide opportunities for individuals who regardless of their location voluntarily form a social aggregation through an online platform for sharing interests, knowledge and experiences.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the rise of trolls and misinformation, social media platforms don’t guarantee safe conditions for these positive, shared social experiences. After all, over 25% of people will avoid joining a discussion if toxicity is present.

Connecting people to a source of reliable information

Between political extremists and Russian troll farms publishing propaganda across the web, it can be challenging for humans to determine fact from fiction in a crisis. At least it is without a reliable news source.

And with 56% of Americans concerned that journalists consciously publish misinformation or exaggerations, publishers must work to connect people to accurate content.

One major benefit of hosting an online community on a media company’s website or app is that its credible content becomes central to that community. More specifically, audience members will gradually form connections around accurate information — which can save lives by keeping people informed throughout a crisis.

Plus, community hubs allow people to discuss and debate the true actions of governments and come up with potential solutions to global emergencies or challenges.

It’s only natural to want to assist others in an emergency — and by bringing people together online, your media company can give people an outlet for support during challenging times. Not only will this enable you to deliver essential information to loyal audiences, but it will also show them that they aren’t alone, reinforcing their resilience in the face of any crisis.

Are you unlocking the hidden value of your anonymous users?

If your media company’s monetizing its audience in any way or form, odds are, your registered users and subscribers are your biggest money-makers. Even so, the largest portion of your audience is probably made up of unknown readers who aren’t contributing much to your overall reader revenue growth.

According to recent data from Viafoura, a shocking 99.6% of publisher unsubscribed audiences, on average, are anonymous visitors. While most of these visitors are passive readers who are less committed to a company’s content than known audience members, you can still get tremendous value from them.

In reality, your anonymous audience is far from useless — it’s an untapped goldmine of information and revenue just waiting to be activated. But before you can extract the full value of your unknown visitors, you need to know exactly why and how they can become loyal and lucrative audience members.

Why publishers are prioritizing anonymous to known audience conversions

Naturally, known audience members give your organization far more data and monetization opportunities than your anonymous visitors.

Rather than waiting for registered users to appear magically, successful publishers have recognized that the key to financial success is to actively nurture their anonymous audiences and encourage them to log in. After all, each of your registered and subscribed audience members first started off as unknown visitors.

Greg Piechota, Researcher-in-Residence at the International News Media Association (INMA), explains that “[we] see reader and ad revenue strategies converging as publishers refocus on registering and logging users.”

Keep in mind that almost every anonymous user can become effectively monetized once they become registered.

Viafoura data also reveals that engaged registered users offer publishers five times more return visits than non-registered users.

Ultimately, converting your anonymous visitors to known users online is an essential step on the road to building audience loyalty and growing your company’s revenue streams.

Registration as a means to improving content performance

You can begin piecing together your users’ profiles as soon as they create profiles on your website or app. The more they interact with your content and fellow users, the more you’ll understand who they are, their needs and the types of content topics and writers they favour.

This valuable data can be harnessed to segment your users into different groups with similar interests, which can then be targeted with relevant content — including advertisements.

Of course, content that aligns more with your users’ interests is more likely to draw their attention, keeping them engaged on your website or app for longer.

“Once you understand your target audience’s needs, you can develop personalized content that addresses their biggest concerns and pain points,” outlines Gartner. “But timing is everything.”

To make the biggest impact on your audience and win over their loyalty, your media company must serve its users the content they want when they crave it, even as their needs and interests change. While you can’t get this information from unknown visitors, you can extract it through the data and comments of your known users.

Turning anonymous users into engaged subscribers

Giving anonymous users the chance to log in to your website is not only key to getting their data, but it can also make your anonymous users become dedicated to your company. The reality is that once you get your anonymous visitors to register, you’re halfway there to getting them to subscribe.

In fact, Viafoura data reveals that registered users are significantly more engaged than their unregistered counterparts, spending an average of 15 times more time on-site after registering. And all that extra time your registered users spend on your company’s website means they have more opportunities to connect with your company’s content and other users.

“News brands that see more known users see more subscribers, and brands that see longer session duration see lower rates of churn,” states Piechota. “[Research prooves that you] get one subscriber for every 10 registrations.”

The Telegraph recently shared that its audience growth goal is framed around this research. More specifically, the company is aiming fo 10 million registered users and one million subscribers as of 2023.

This reinforces the fact that you can unlock significant value — including engagement and subscription revenue — from a large portion of your anonymous audience simply by getting them to register.

So if the majority of your company’s audience is anonymous, what’s stopping you from encouraging that massive group of people to become registered, known and returning users? From there, you can use their available data and growing loyalty to your advantage, further enhancing your organization’s engagement, content, subscription and ad revenue strategies.

Best Practices From A Data-Driven Audience Engagement Manager

Audience engagement managers have become a core component of publishing teams in newsrooms across the country. An audience engagement manager’s primary purpose is to manage how the audience evolves from casual readers to engaged members of the community.

To do that, they need the right audience engagement solution to moderate how people flow through the customer journey across your website. You want a platform that will encourage conversations to occur about your content so that people form an attachment to your brand and your community.

Brand attachment and affinity breeds customer loyalty. As an audience engagement manager, customer loyalty is one of the most important KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. Using the right audience engagement platform, you can leverage detailed audience profiles built upon first-party data insights to create the types of personalised content experiences that will help build that customer loyalty.

Know your target conversion rates

The aim of most publications is to increase the number of subscribers who willfully choose to consume and interact with your content. These companies use metrics like paywall stop rates to measure how many unique visitors are choosing to go beyond the paywall and become subscribers. A metre stop rate of 5 to 7 percent should be the target to measure effectiveness; if you’re performing above that threshold, you have a very active and engaged audience.

As the audience engagement manager, you also want to segment the types of people who are hitting your paywalls into different tiers of users. Start by creating segments for the one-time and passive visitors, which are people who interact with one to five pieces of content over the course of a month’s timeline.

Then there are the active users who regularly consume your content, perhaps on a daily basis. According to The Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a subsidiary of the Harvard Kennedy School research centre, approximately 9 percent of your users can be classified as active or regular readers of your content.

With those benchmarks in hand, an audience engagement manager can formulate strategies for how to meet or exceed those targets.

Identify the needs and interests of key demographics

As an audience engagement manager, you need to create content and communication strategies that speak the same language of your target audience. To do that, you need to develop deeper insights into what topics get their attention, how they’re likely to interact with different pieces of content and, perhaps most importantly, what is least likely to earn their attention and engagement.

One of the best ways to monitor that engagement is to use the right on-site metrics. As an audience engagement manager, you can use first-party data like page views, on-site engagement actions, time spent on pages, overall retention rates, and more insights to build rich audience profiles.

Those profiles will tell you more about what your readers are most interested in when interacting with content on your website. Using those insights, you can develop personal engagement tactics to grow the size of your audience base and guide more people to become those highly valued active consumers of your content.

What to look for in an audience engagement platform

So what is the type of solution best suited to help you create effective audience engagement strategies that help drive higher subscriptions and fuel growth for the business? Above all else, you need to know that the platform you integrate into your site can help you achieve your goals for the business.

Remember that sustainable audience growth is based on engagement and the valuable exchange of moments you have with your community. A beneficial audience engagement platform should help you acquire predictive analytics and data-driven insights to make logical decisions with your content, which will further enhance the value of your website experience.

Focus on how to drive up customer loyalty

For example, a strong audience engagement platform will improve engagement across your website. It can potentially increase conversion rates up to 25 times above existing site conversion rates.

Higher engagement and conversion rates is an excellent indicator of user lifetime value, which is indicative of strong customer loyalty among your users. Graham Media Inc. was one media company that sought to achieve this exact objective and, thanks to their partnership with Viafoura, they were able to boost user lifetime value by over 150 percent.

Final takeaways

Above all else, any audience engagement solution you implement should be provided by experts that can function as partners to your business rather than simple vendors. Your partner should be proactive by providing you with strategic recommendations on how best to gain those valuable insights from the platform. Once you have that first-party data on hand, you can focus on how to implement the takeaways and optimise your content to help drive direct impact on your business.

By leaning on insights gleaned from these platforms, audience engagement managers can spend more time on the big picture. You can focus more time coaching the rest of your publication team on how best to use these insights and improve engagement with audiences across all digital channels.

The benefits of hosting positive online interactions

When a person has a negative experience with a company, their most logical course of action is to cut off all interactions with that business. In the same sense, having troll-infested commenting sections on your company’s website or app can drive people away from engaging experiences and content.

Keep in mind that 13% of people will abandon an online service altogether if it’s associated with online harassment in any way.

The reality is that people are less loyal to brands that allow toxicity to exist in their online social spaces.

Companies that keep their commenting spaces free of toxicity and trolls with an advanced moderation system allow users to have positive interactions around their brands, leading to serious, tangible advantages for publishers.

Accessing the advantages of well-moderated social spaces

Think of it this way: Users that have positive social experiences with your brand are more likely to stick around longer to interact with your company’s website. And that translates directly into having more rich, consented, first-party data that you can draw from your audience’s activity.

This data is key to your company’s success ⁠— and you can collect it easily on your website through interactive tools, like commenting solutions.

But not all interactive, community-building solutions are strong enough to help media companies shape positive user interactions. Nor do they all offer full access to first-party user data.

To keep social spaces free of toxic behaviour, publishers should take on moderation tools that can instantly understand and block all 6.5 million variations of offensive words and adapt as language evolves. It’s also just as important to make sure that extensive first-party data can be drawn from any social tools used.

Publishers that use advanced moderation services to reinforce positive audience experiences can then improve business results by accessing in-depth user data, including the following information types:

Audience interests

While monitoring content performance and visits on a page may have been enough for media companies in the past, today, publishers need to dig deeper to meet audience expectations.

“[What] sets successful newsrooms apart is that they do not use data to merely track content but to better understand their audience.” writes Marcela Kunova, an editor at Journalism.co.uk. “Listening to their users helps them discover their needs and then tailor the news products and services to make the audience happy.”

And well-moderated social experiences can help media companies unlock a massive amount of information about what their users are interested in.

Some of this data can be pulled from comments that express what your audience wants to see more or less of. You can also monitor content topic and author follows as well as user engagement levels around different stories to see what’s resonating with your community the most.

Predictive knowledge

If you want to consistently earn your audience members’ attention, you’ll have to meet their expectations even as their needs and wants evolve.

After all, 64% of people will happily exchange their data for relevant experiences. Plus, almost half of consumers are disappointed when media companies don’t suggest good content recommendations.

There’s an easy way to meet your consumers’ expectations, though. You can simply use engagement data to predict their future behaviours.

More specifically, your audience members will leave a trail of enriched data as they have positive interactions with your company’s social tools. From there, engagement data can be collected, analyzed and used to predict how likely users are to subscribe, unsubscribe and interact with specific content topics.

This advanced information can be fed into different tools and strategies, allowing publishers to offer captivating personalized experiences, subscription offers and re-engagement campaigns.

Insight on user habits

There’s a clear connection between your community’s everyday habits and their loyalty toward your brand.

Greg Piechota, the International News Media Association’s researcher-in-residence, explains that “[creating] habits in your readers is critical to maintaining them as subscribers and reducing churn.

“Ultimately, the more you can encourage users to get in the habit of visiting your website or app, the more likely they are to become loyal to your brand.

You can find out whether or not your audience members are developing worthwhile habits based on the frequency of their positive interactions across your digital properties.

The impact of positive user interactions on your company

Currently, 500 leading publishers worldwide could lose up to 52% of their revenue as third-party cookies disappear just because they’re missing out on critical first-party data.

Meanwhile, hosting safe and positive user experiences online can bring publishers 35% more comments — and that means more actionable data and related revenue for your company.

So by making sure that your audience’s interactions across your digital properties remain positive, you can maximize your ability to collect fully consented data and strengthen business results.

DC Thomson enhances its audience growth strategy with Viafoura’s digital experience platform

DC Thomson, a leading UK-based media company serving news and entertainment to audiences worldwide, is working with Viafoura to bring positive, engaging experiences to its websites’ visitors. With support from Viafoura’s digital experience platform and advanced moderation services, DC Thomson now offers subscribers and registered users rich, interactive social opportunities and personalized notifications.

This partnership has equipped the media company with products designed to encourage respectful discussions and debates between audience members around the content and authors they love. Each of these products — including Viafoura Conversations — are supported with automated and human moderation to keep discourse positive and free of hate.

In the future, the media company plans to launch Viafoura’s moderated Live Blogs and Community Chats as well.

“The folks at DC Thomson are obviously passionate about creating a first-class user experience on their site,” says Viafoura’s Director of Customer Experience, Dalia Vainer. “We’re so happy to be part of their journey toward delivering more engaging experiences and keeping conversations civil.”

Alan McCabe, Head of Product for news brands at DC Thomson, said the team selected Viafoura as a critical partner in audience engagement after realizing that Viafoura could help boost user engagement, time on site, retention and subscriptions.

“We want our customers to have the best possible experience when visiting our websites. Viafoura’s solution helps us do that by allowing our subscribers and registered users to engage with us and each other in a positive, harmonious fashion,” states McCabe. “Now that our audience members can share their views, join discussions and connect with our journalists, they’ll spend more time engaged on our websites.”

DC Thomson will also be able to gather and analyze audience data as users interact with Viafoura’s engagement experiences. This will help staff better understand its customer base and improve future business initiatives.

According to McCabe, adopting the Viafoura platform was a smooth and successful process, causing no disruptions to users.

“The support given to our team during the process was excellent and helped ensure that Viafoura’s experiences integrated properly with our existing user flows and registration process,” says McCabe.

Going forward, McCabe expects that these positive and engaging experiences will help the media company maximize audience interest, growing loyalty toward its brands.

El Espectador is driving meaningful engagement experiences with Viafoura

El Espectador is the oldest and most emblematic newspaper in Colombia. Founded in 1887 by Fidel Cano Gutiérrez in the city of Medellin, it has been a bastion of liberal thought and ideas, of independence, and of investigative and denunciatory journalism. Since its first issue, its motto has been “El Espectador will work for the good of the country with liberal criteria and for the good of the liberal principles with patriotic criteria”. It is now recognized as one of the top newspapers in the country*.

El Espectador has partnered with Viafoura to launch a full suite of engagement solutions designed to generate a more interactive experience for readers on its website that will ultimately foster a stronger sense of community. These solutions include comments moderated by Viafoura’s AI engine, live blogs to cover breaking events like elections or sports games, chats for community members, and trending conversations.

According to Alvaro Cuesta, UX and audience monetization manager at El Espectador, “We aspire to create a space that will encourage open, civil debate while also encouraging the generation of opinions – a place where our audience will feel like they are part of the editorial team by participating in the coverage of relevant, up-to-date events.”

“The solution implementation process has been extremely positive. Viafoura’s developers were attentive to our requirements, recognizing our unique needs. We’re excited for our future with Viafoura,” says Cuesta.

“We’re really excited to partner with the El Espectador team to improve the quality of conversations on their site. I look forward to seeing how Viafoura’s Live Blogs and Community Chats will help their editorial team create meaningful engagement experiences with their audience.” says Dalia Vainer, Director Customer Experience at Viafoura.

* https://www.4imn.com/co/

Perfil swaps Facebook Comments with Viafoura’s digital experience platform to boost business results

Perfil, one of Latin America’s most prominent newspaper and magazine publishers, has teamed up with Viafoura to improve the commenting experience for readers and subscribers on its website. Viafoura’s digital experience platform now offers Perfil’s audience members the ability to engage with one another in a positive way, follow their favourite topics and get notifications based on their interests.

According to Perfil Digital Director Agustino Fontevecchia, the media company chose to replace its previous commenting tool, Facebook Comments, with Viafoura Conversations. Now, Viafoura will deliver superior, toxic-free discussion spaces and personalized experiences to the media company’s audience members.

While Facebook Comments lacked moderation and support services, leading to toxic interactions, Viafoura’s digital experience platform is supported with intelligent automated moderation. As a result, Perfil will be able to establish meaningful discussion spaces ⁠— free of toxicity and spam ⁠— that users will want to return to and participate in.

“We’re delighted that Perfil is launching Viafoura as part of an ongoing effort to provide a more positive, seamless and personalized user experience,” states Dalia Vainer, Director of Customer Experience at Viafoura.

Even before adopting Viafoura’s platform, Fontevecchia was confident that a positive discussion experience would add value for publishers and their users by spurring civil communities and increasing conversion opportunities.

“At Perfil, our expertise in politics and economics in a world of fragmentation and polarization means our qualified readership is constantly looking for spaces to express itself and keep the debate going,” says Fontevecchia. “Viafoura offered our team enhanced control over the commenting experience for our readers and subscribers, allowing us to achieve a higher level of audience engagement.”

Perfil plans to lock this commenting experience for website visitors to ensure that only registered people are allowed to post, which will naturally raise the quality of conversations. By reserving these higher-quality conversations for registered users, the media organization is also set to unlock user loyalty and additional revenue.

Fontevecchia explains that as Viafoura helps boost user registrations, time users spend consuming content and engagement, subscriptions will also rise. This means that Perfil will now have new additional opportunities to monetize its audience’s comments.

“And in terms of onboarding and implementation, Viafoura’s team and documentation have been extremely straightforward and reliable,” Fontevecchia concludes. “We felt completely supported during every step of the process, from start to finish.”

The Twitter takeover — another reason to build engaged and active communities on your owned and operated properties

Monday April 25th, 2022, Twitter’s board accepted billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social media company and take it private. The announcement ends what can only be called a weeks-long media firestorm as Musk offered to buy the company for $44 billion. Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 for each share of common stock — a significant premium over the stock’s price from just months earlier.

Musk has often referred to himself as a “free speech supporter” and has been a loud critic of content moderation policies put in place by organizations, like Twitter, to stem the flow of misinformation, enforce authenticity and prevent harassment.

Musk also seems to believe that he’s advancing the free speech movement by taking over the social platform. For instance, he claims that he wants “to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.”

Generally, the news has raised eyebrows.

Between Musk’s recent statements and the implied return of users currently banned from the platform, many believe he’s bound to run into conflict with multiple regulators. Now, Thierry Breton, the European Union’s commissioner for the internal market, has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must follow the rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online.

What does this mean to publishers dependent on social media platforms like Twitter? According to Musk, he plans to have less content moderation on Twitter. This means that publishers will soon be at the mercy of his social media strategies, which will be based on his own definition of truthful or accurate news and a free-sharing audience.

The bottom line is that publishers must be in control of their community guidelines and content moderation. In other words, they need to be in a position where they can protect against misinformation and personal attacks on their journalists.

For this reason, publishers need to invest in building their communities and audience conversations away from social media. After all, there’s no better way to keep audience engagement where it belongs — directly on publisher-owned websites!

Many digital publishers have already started moving to adopt on-site engagement strategies and solutions, including real-time conversations and live Q&As, to grow audiences, gather first-party data and ultimately drive sustainable monetization. However, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has highlighted the need to accelerate that strategy.

Rest assured that wherever Twitter goes from here, Viafoura will be ready to clear you a path for building an engaged and safe online community.

Rebuilding Trust: Convincing Skeptical News Readers to Convert

Spotlight:

Trust in media is dwindling, with more than half of news consumers (58%) skeptical of media companies.
Although 50% of people lose interest in content near toxic behavior, you can moderate on-site social spaces to build trust around content.
Since news sites are 25% more trusted than social media, news organizations should focus on building relationships with audiences on their own properties.
Subject matter experts can participate in the content creation process to boost brand authority over specific topics.
Media companies can integrate first-party data into their content strategies to convince news readers to trust their brands for relevant content and experiences.
Community engagement tools, like Viafoura’s Engagement Suite, paired with trust-building strategies can help companies establish authority and increase conversions.

Misinformation from global leaders and social media in the past has severely damaged people’s trust in content online. As a result, a large portion of the public is extremely critical of content created by media organizations.

Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer report reveals that more than half of consumers no longer trust the media.

In fact, Edelman’s study highlights that 58% of people think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”

But trust is an essential ingredient that media companies need if they want to develop long-lasting relationships with audiences.

To convince people to become registered users, community members and paying subscribers, media companies must rebuild their reputations as trustworthy resources.

Uncover a few practical ways you can encourage skeptical audiences to trust your company for news content and safe digital experiences below.

Moderate Your Company’s Discussion Spaces

Social spaces help media companies engage and convert people around their content, but these areas can also become overridden with trolls, misinformation, and offensive comments without constant moderation.

And unfortunately, a toxic environment can undermine any trustworthy content or experiences hosted within it.

If you want to protect your audience members and reinforce the safe, trusted nature of your business, comment moderation is a necessity for your on-site discussion spaces. Especially since 50% of people that experience toxic behavior online will lose interest in nearby content.

Implementing an effective comment moderation solution on your company’s website or app will show audiences that they can trust your organization for positive content experiences.

Reduce Your Dependence on Social Media

While most media companies use social media to reach and engage audiences, a significant amount of people no longer trust social media. This means any content your organization posts on social media won’t be seen as reliable information by default.

A report from the Reuters Institute outlines how sources on social media “[seem] interchangeable, making it difficult to discern where stories originated online and even [undermine] trust in the information environment more generally.”

It’s no surprise that, on average, people trust information on news sites 25% more than on social media.

The bottom line is that social media has earned itself a reputation for creating data leaks, rewarding misinformation in its algorithms and failing to moderate offensive behavior. And the only way to disassociate yourself from social media’s negative reputation and establish trust with readers is to engage them right on your own properties.

Consider implementing on-site commenting tools and providing personalized reader experiences on your website or app to build trust and nurture audience relationships.

Feature Subject Matter Experts in Content

There’s nothing that can build credibility around a particular topic quite as well as a qualified subject matter expert (SME) can. So to develop your organization’s authority over a specific subject, you can interview and quote SMEs in your content or even commission them to write a piece for your company.

Scientific American, for instance, enlists the help of practitioners to create about half of its content to help educate people as much as possible.

“[Scientific] topics, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, advice pages on topics such as home remodeling… or advice on parenting issues…. should also come from “expert” or experienced sources that users can trust,” explains Jonathan Hedger, the marketing director for an app that connects people to freelance SMEs.

Since SMEs have dedicated their careers and lives to learning about a particular subject, their voice often carries more authority and trust than an average journalist.

Create Content and Experiences Based on Unique Reader Interests

What’s your company doing to ensure readers can trust it for content that’s captivating and relevant?

Give readers the content and experiences they want by using your first-party data to understand their preferences. From there, you can adjust your company’s content and on-site experiences to align with reader interests.

“If you understand who your audience is… it allows you to [optimize] your offering around them,” says Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant and expert on subscriptions. “It allows you to keep [their interest] for a long time, build loyalty and trust, and expand the relationship over time.”

You can partner with Viafoura to host engaging experiences for readers across your digital properties and collect critical first-party engagement and behavioral data.

At the end of the day, trust is easy to lose and challenging to regain.

But with the proper support and trust-building strategies in place, you can convert skeptical news readers into loyal, paying community members.