Blog Archives | Page 2 of 28

Amplifying Voices: Australian Community Media’s Bold Move to Fuse Online UGC with Print

We’re thrilled to share some exciting news that’s sure to inspire your own engagement strategies. Australian Community Media (ACM), a Viafoura customer, has launched an innovative new approach to recirculation that’s sparking conversations and delivering early results.

ACM, Australia’s largest independent publishing company, reaches 4.3 million Aussies monthly across 100 brands, and has always had a finger on the pulse of their communities. With a commitment to strong connections, trusted content, and insightful marketing solutions, ACM is always looking to engage audiences in new, innovative ways.

Coming off a recent Customer Corner session exclusively for Viafoura customers, ACM took inspiration from the cross-functional comment recirculation approach led by Philippa Law in the the Telegraph Conversations Newsletter. Eager to approach a similar ethos, ACM has started to integrate User Generated Content (UGC) from their web platforms into their print publications. The aim? To bridge the gap between traditional print and the vibrant digital sphere, adding value to digital subscription proposals and ultimately creating a new experience for conversion.

“We want to show them the quality of the discussion online, that is moderated and ensures they can engage with other subscribers and have their voices heard.” says Emily Sweet, Acting Managing Editor.

ACM’s senior newsroom leaders are taking an active approach in the community by engaging in topical stories and igniting dialogues by pinning comments and shining a spotlight on editor’s picks. The encouragement to engage is welcome by the trust in civility across the site with Viafoura’s full services content moderation suite aimed to build trust in both the community and editors to engage safely.

To ensure success, ACM has outlined the following strategic goals:

Engage more readers to actively participate in discussions that hit home. By showcasing comments in print centered around topical discussions, print readers get a glimpse into the vibrant conversations online, enticing them to dive into the digital realm.
Increase subscriptions by adding additional value points at every point in the reader funnel.
Drive news stories and the voice of the community forward. Readers get a front-row seat to the thoughts of fellow subscribers, embracing a holistic view of pressing issues.

Early results have been promising – the spotlight on UGC in print stirred up even more engagement online, with readers spending more time soaking in the discussions. ACM is keeping a close eye on this trend, and we’re excited to see the impact unfold over the upcoming weeks.

“Cross-promoting our website commentary in print helps show already engaged readers that we are building a safe, online community that they can be part of.” – Emily Sweet.

As proud partners of ACM’s UGC journey, we’re looking forward to keeping you updated on more success stories and inspire you to take your engagement strategies to the next level!

Advancing Accessibility: Viafoura Leading the Way with Inclusive Design

Viafoura is deeply committed to ensuring our products are accessible to all users. Our dedication to creating universally usable experiences is core to our approach to product development. This commitment to ensuring quality experiences for all users, makes accessibility a priority from the very beginning of our design process.

Introducing Our Accessibility Expert: Farhan Jiwani!

Central to our accessibility efforts is Farhan Jiwani, a Senior Front End Engineer, and accessibility subject matter expert at Viafoura. With over a decade of experience in accessibility, Farhan’s passion began when one of his former clients, a Bank, made accessibility a priority years ago. This experience spurred his desire to make communication universally accessible.

“I started off my dev career because I wanted to write really cool code, now I stay because I want to build a world that is as accessible as possible & reaches as many people as possible,” says Farhan.

Our approach to accessibility begins at the first stage of the design process. Farhan works closely with our design team to integrate accessibility considerations into our products. By introducing these considerations early on, we keep accessibility at the forefront throughout the product development cycle.

When asked what gives him satisfaction at work, Farhan responded: “Making the world better, just by making Viafoura better”.

Prioritizing Accessibility as a Key Objective

For us, accessibility is not an add-on, it’s a strategic goal. By including accessibility in our core OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), we keep it central to our product development process, which helps to keep our tools compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards as well a regional legislative requirements such as the AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act).

Recognizing Achievement: Viafoura Accessibility Audit

Recently, we partnered with the wonderful team at Fable Tech Labs to conduct our annual accessibility audit. The results were remarkable! The audit involved testing our platform with 20 diverse accessibility users, including those who rely on screen readers, screen magnification, and alternative navigation methods. 100% of these users scored Viafoura’s tools as Easy to Use and Satisfies Accessibility Guidelines.

Key areas of the audit, such as Conversation Flow, Profile Login Flow, and Engagement Starter, were rigorously tested and passed without any significant issues. Testers appreciated the clear heading structure, high contrast notification bell, and well-spaced fonts that increased readability for low vision users.

One tester noted, ““The heading structure was very straightforward and easy to navigate. Each of the headings took me directly to the sections I was looking for, and the elements under the comment section were easy to learn how to interact with.” a testament to our focus on accessible design.

Looking Forward with Viafoura Accessibility

Our aim is to keep pushing the boundaries of disability-inclusive design and elevate the standards for accessibility. Our next objective is to restructure coding conventions to meet the highest accessibility standards, enhancing the developer experience and allowing for quicker updates and improvements.

With Farhan’s expertise and the commitment of our entire team, we strive to keep setting new benchmarks in inclusive product design.

Healthing.ca launches Community with Viafoura to Enhance Digital Health Experience

We are excited to announce the launch of Viafoura’s digital experience platform on Healthing.ca, a vertical of Postmedia Network dedicated to delivering trusted health information and fostering a supportive community! This collaboration signifies a significant milestone towards Healthing’s mission to revolutionize the digital health experience for Canadians.

Healthing.ca faces unique challenges in moderating first-person accounts and real-life stories discussing health conditions and symptoms, requiring a safe and civil community environment. “Viafoura is a trusted partner of the Postmedia Network and a valuable connection to our communities.The product suite allows us to connect with our users and encourage meaningful conversation while offering a personalized experience in a safe space”, said Andrew Robichaud, Product Team Lead.

Using the core conversations suite, Healthing is looking forward to driving strategic results, as achieved with other brands under the Postmedia umbrella. Core business metrics include:

Lift in Registrations
Increase in onsite engagement including UGC
Lift in time spent on site

“We believe the support and connection that comes with the Viafoura platform will drastically improve the user experience and our users’ outcomes in their healthcare journeys.” Says Andrew.

“We’re thrilled to continue our expansion with one of Canada’s largest publishers as they introduce community engagement in the health space! We’re particularly looking forward to adding additional first-party data that can be used by Healthing.ca for activation and engagement strategies brand-wide”, said Dalia Vainer, Director of Customer Experience at Viafoura.

Thank you for trusting Viafoura, and cheers to our continued success!

Viafoura Receives Two G2 Badges, Maintains High Performer Status in Online Community Management & Commenting Systems

We are pleased to announce that in the latest G2 Summer 2023 Report, Viafoura has once again been recognized as a High Performer across the Online Community Management & Commenting Systems grids. This impressive achievement marks the fifth consecutive quarter that Viafoura has received this esteemed recognition.

Continuously Delivering Exceptional Engagement Experiences:

Viafoura’s success can be attributed to our unwavering commitment to delivering exceptional engagement experiences to our customers. By providing innovative commenting solutions and effective moderation tools, we are proud to enable publishers to create thriving online communities and foster meaningful interactions among their audiences.

Impactful and Strategic Value:

The G2 badges earned by Viafoura reflect the positive feedback and reviews from our customers. These accolades serve as a testament to the platform’s ability to drive real, impactful, and strategic value for publishers.

Listening to Customer Feedback:

Viafoura’s consistent recognition as a High Performer on the G2 grids is a result of our dedication to listening to our customers. By paying attention to customer reviews and feedback, we strive to continually refine and enhance our platform to meet the evolving needs of publishers. This customer-centric approach allows us to stay at the forefront of the industry and deliver cutting-edge solutions.

To our customers – thank you for continuing to choose us, we are passionate about our role in you achieving your business outcomes.

To our team – thank you for your unwavering commitment and congratulations on the well-deserved achievements.

Here’s to continued success in shaping the future of digital experiences!

Endeavor Business Media – creating meaningful connections while activating their audiences

Endeavor Business Media is a business-to-business media company operating 80+ media brands and 40+ events, including conferences and exhibitions. Their mission is to create meaningful connections that help businesses attract new customers, connect with and sell to existing customers, generate leads, showcase their products, and discover new solutions and partners. Endeavor targets narrow verticals in specific industries, such as law enforcement, electrical engineering, or supply chain logistics. They build online communities for these industries, providing positive, helpful user-generated content focused on business decision-makers.

Endeavor wanted to ensure that their sites remained engaging yet civilized while allowing for disparate points of view. However, guaranteeing their high standards were consistently applied was challenging and time-consuming for their community moderators.

There are so many reasons for Viafoura and Endeavor to be excited about the future. With the use of Conversations, Viafoura’s AI-powered moderation, Trending Articles and Topics, Endeavor will be powering active, engaged communities by:

Highlighting insightful the best comments within a comment thread,
Using Viafoura’s integration capabilities to connect with Endeavor’s content management system – making it easy for their registered members to participate in online communities,
Moderating comments right within Endeavor’s front end is a feature that will make it faster to remove inappropriate content from comment threads. Moderators will undoubtedly value the Viafoura moderation console for all of its power and features,
And, of course, the real-time commenting features give site visitors a sense of an active, healthy community. “

Alex Dunne, Senior Director of Product Management at Endeavor Business Media, says, “We believe Viafoura’s rich commenting features will drive more site registrations, improve site engagement levels, increase page views, repeat visits, and ad revenue. Simultaneously we’ll be gathering behavioural data about visitors to all of Endeavor’s sites, enabling us to drive leads and personalization.”

“We look forward to working with the wide breadth of professional communities at Endeavor Business Media! Using Viafoura core community products, Endeavor will continue to remain the center of critical conversations with market experts and decision-makers through direct, meaningful connections. We are particularly excited to foster and unlock an additional layer of 1st party data, bringing new interest cohorts that can be funneled back to the business,” says Dalia Vainer, Director of Customer Experience at Viafoura.

Why recirculation should be one of your KPIs and how to increase it, with takeaways from The Independent

Recirculation: a real-time metric that compares the number of visitors to a page to the number of users who move from that content to another page.

Why is recirculation a valuable KPI?

Recirculation is more valuable to your business than acquiring new visitors. Not only is acquisition becoming increasingly difficult and costly, viewing more pages on each visit means higher engagement, loyalty and propensity to subscribe, all of which directly correlate to revenue.

According to Chartbeat, there are 3 things that make up the anatomy of a recirculation strategy:

Show off the depth and quality of your content, so every reader knows that you have more than just the great article they clicked on
Given the amount of readers that come from external platforms like Google and Facebook, almost all of which are landing on an article rather than your homepage, a clear recirculation strategy can push those readers further down the loyalty journey
Most publishers rely on programmatic widgets to surface related stories, but related links — chosen by editors and placed at strategic points in the story — are an effective way to encourage deeper visits. Especially on mobile, where more widgets appear at the bottom of the page (where no readers will see them)

The Independent, mastering the recirculation game

Just a single article contains 5 recirculation techniques for you to steal:

1. Backlinks on keywords

Learn to link: add backlinks on keywords, leading to other articles or content topics:

⭐ Best practice: differentiate these linked words and phrases from other text by placing them in another color or underlining them. This practice should be consistent across your site so users recognize where to click.

But don’t forget to check your average scroll depth for optimal click potential:

Chartbeat research has found that the majority of clicks happen just above the digital fold, at page depths of 400 to 600 pixels (as indicated below), so it’s important to optimize your articles for those related links.

Discover Chartbeat’s other research on optimal article length

2. An interactive, Instagram story style slide-show shares 6 top articles

💡 Images with links generate 63% more clicks than those of text-only (data from Lenfest Institute) and, considering the amount of time your audience spends on social media, taking inspiration from there to increase engagement can only prove beneficial.

The key to good recirculation is through interactivity – engaging visitors in a positive way to make suggested articles feel personal and non-intrusive, being careful to cater to the reader’s interests as well as your own.

3. Personalized recommendations based on the content topic

This is more valuable than recommending content at the end of the article as Average Scroll Depth metrics will likely reveal that a large percentage of your audience don’t read until the end.

4. ‘Most popular’ content recommendations at the side of the page

💡 Generic wording (e.g. “Related Stories”) generates higher CTRs than more complex wording (e.g. “What Else People Can Read on This Topic”) according to data from the Center for Media Engagement. Note how all of these examples from The Independent involve phrases with a maximum of 2 words.

What’s more, inviting readers to discover your most popular articles allows them to feel part of a shared conversation, being ‘in the know’ by reading the articles that others are reading. This was Netflix’s thought process behind the “Top 10 in [insert your country]” feature.

5. At the end, a small “More about” text offering links to key topics featured in the article

A final chance to lead your user on to another article, however don’t bet on all readers reaching this point.

Don’t recirculate without thinking

Poor recirculation can have more of a negative than positive impact on engagement, so don’t go overboard and make sure to consider your recirculation tactics carefully.

For The Independent, these 5 strategies were all employed in a single article. Of course, recirculation is valuable, but so is a pleasant, engaging user experience. If there are too many distractions or frustrating features that prevent the reader from being able to consume the article ‘in peace’, then recirculation efforts will be wasted and you may even push your reader away. This is especially true for websites that depend on advertising (an additional distraction for readers), or for users visiting on mobile devices where the screen is smaller.

You should also aim to make the most out of your content resources for recirculation:

Surface popular content that are a dead end for readers – these represent your best opportunities to drive recirculation
Segment traffic and tailor your recirculation strategy based on source, user interests or device used
Leverage the Heads Up Display. This helps you know if the reason why readers are leaving the page is because of another story on your website
Use historical engagement data to find good potential recircultation links

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

Drive ARPU with an engaged, registered user

2023 is a year where success will all come down to the bottom line. Ad revenues and subscription rates are under pressure as the economy teeters on the brink of a recession. Publishers are impacted by revenue decisions forcing corporate reorganizations and the scaling back of available resources. So, where should a publisher focus its efforts this year?

Insight

Mather Economics has worked with its clients to address an interesting question: “What amount of resources should be invested to move readers from anonymous users to known users”? Arvid Tchivzhel, Managing Director, and Matt Lindsay, President of Mather Economics, believe the answer to this question “depends on the lifetime value of a subscriber, the amount of digital advertising revenue at risk, and the incremental lift in subscriptions from knowing the reader relative to an unknown user.”

Ken Harding and Justin Eisenband of FTI Consulting provided INMA with fascinating financial insight. Their research determined that “most publishers with at least average retention and monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) of US$10+ can generate a long term value (LTV) of between US$175 and US$225”. These ARPU numbers aren’t far off those provided by The Wall Street Journal, which recently released its ARPU at US $8.90.

While ARPU has several sources, a large portion of that revenue comes from subscriptions. Piano has analyzed subscription numbers to determine their origin. They discovered that “while the conversion rate for anonymous visitors is just 0.22%, conversion rises to 9.88%” for registered users – dramatically increasing by forty-five times! Publishers’ focus must be converting that anonymous reader into a registered user.

Viafoura recently analyzed its last two years of anonymized data to determine what type of reader would best drive revenue for publishers. We found that readers who engaged with a Viafoura solution have a fifty-one times higher propensity to register with that publisher. However, the story doesn’t end with the registration. We also determined that an engaged, registered user is much more valuable than a passive one. An engaged, registered reader spends almost 30% more time on site during each visit and consumes nearly 20% more page views – thereby increasing ad and subscription revenue.

Conversion tactics

So how does one drive that fly-by reader into an engaged, registered reader? By making them aware of your vibrant, civil community and ensuring their experience is so personalized that they remain loyal to your site with the ultimate engagement trifecta..

Optimizations: “Un-gate” comments

We’ve seen publishers un-gate or display comments and community engagement on their paywall pages and have a significant impact on their revenue and conversions:

Ad impact
One of our customers experienced the following up-lift to their ads:

Subscription impact
Another customer that recently un-gated the comments from their paywall, meaning that readers could see the comments but not the article without subscribing, and saw community led subscriptions climb 500%.

Editorial engagement with mid-article units

We’ve also seen publishers insert a mid-article unit designed to drive awareness of their community. Some use polls, while others use a featured or editor’s pick comment to pique the reader’s curiosity and have them engage with the community. This accelerated the publisher’s monthly funnel and saw a 0.7% increase in active engaged users, a 0.4% lift in registered users, and a dramatic 4.3% lift in user generated content contributors.

Increasing discoverability

Other publishers have increased discoverability with the use of a Notification Bell. This easy implementation has grown community engagement driving one customer to see the volume of comments increase by 58%, comments per article increase by 17%, likes and dislikes on comments increase by 58 %, replies to comments increase by 77% and clicks on the more active conversations increase by 30%.

2023 revenue drive

This year, publishers should focus on solutions that drive readers to register and engage with their brand. Over the past three years, those users are four times more loyal to a publisher than the overall reader population and view significantly more pages.

Maximizing engagement and registrations will ultimately drive revenue from both subscriptions and ads.

Want to read more? Download our whitepaper, which provides more detail on data points, benchmarking, and driving revenue.

El País driving engagement growth with Viafoura’s solutions

The challenge of elevating the reader relationship from casual to actively engaged subscribers is common. When paired with also building a robust, insightful data repository that can provide a unified view of the user, one might consider the challenge an elevated one. El País is a publisher that has this well in hand!

El Pais is a family owned company founded in 1918, which has been leading the news industry in Uruguay for decades. It has come to be a reference source of truthful and relevant journalism as well as entertainment across its network of news sites, newsletters, podcasts and social networks.

With the implementation of Viafoura’s Conversations and Auto-Moderation solutions, El País is well on its way to driving first-rate engagement levels on its digital properties. These high levels of engagement lead to the collection of both passive data, being the information gathered on where the reader goes on the website and what content they read, as well as active data, which is taken from the readers’ interaction or engagement with a site – this could be the comments they leave, the likes or dislikes, etc.

Diego Acosta y Lara, Chief Technology Officer at El País, comments, “our goal is to create a smooth user experience. We want our readers to engage with our content and return to our digital sites often. Additionally, with data collection in hyperdrive, El País aims to activate the data to drive both ad revenue and subscriptions.”

Ensuring that El País is successful in achieving its goals is Dalia Vainer, Viafoura’s Director of Customer Success. Dalia comments on Viafoura’s newest partnership: “El País already has an established commenting community but is turning to Viafoura to deliver an elevated user experience that will provide rich, valuable first-party data and insights. We’re thrilled to work with the team to achieve these goals and look forward to celebrating success together!”

5 Step Guide to Create a Safe Online Community

As Trust & Safety move to the forefront of legislative assemblies around the world [https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful-online-content.html] [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/a-guide-to-the-online-safety-bill], creating an online community that is a safe space for all is more important than ever. And with nearly 70% of audiences spending more than 15% of their time on-site reading posts and comments, you want to ensure your guidelines cover the comments most likely to drive the community away. But the challenge remains: how do you regulate countless unknown users that have access to your platform and make sure everyone plays by the same rules?

To help build your community, we’re giving you our 5-step guide to creating community guidelines that stick.

1. State the purpose

What’s the point? Why are we here? Why are you taking the time to ensure your audience has a safe space to engage? Because your audience is the most important part of your community, how they behave on your site directly impacts loyalty, retention, and revenue. When you start by defining your purpose, you can ensure that everything that follows contributes to it. Your mission statement for your community should connect with your company’s overall vision, state your goals, and clearly explain the type of community you hope to achieve.

2. Create the rules

The next step to creating a healthy online community is to define your site’s engagement rules: starting writing. Your guidelines should clearly spell out both acceptable and expected user behavior when using your platform and participating in your community. By explicitly stating the rules of engagement, you have a standard you can point to and enforce to remind users of expected behavior or remove toxic users who refuse to follow the rules. We’re here to give you some tips on preparing your own set of community guidelines.

While guidelines will vary across communities (and jurisdictions), there are some key elements that should be covered:

Personal attacks: how far is too far? Are certain people fair game? Are others off-limits?
Vulgar or obscene content: are you PG or R? In what context is “shit” ok? What about “bullshit”? (and yes, we have a “shitlist” workshop we use that can help with examples).
Libelous or defamatory statements
Anything described as threatening, abusive, pornographic, profane, indecent, or otherwise objectionable
Self-promotion, including links to blogs, 3rd party social, or crowdfunding sites

And remember that even though your focus should be the do’s and don’ts for your community, including the why can help build buy-in: Use your guidelines to outline the type of community you want to create so users can know how best to contribute.

3. Make it accessible

Once you’ve spent the time and effort to define your guidelines, it’s time to share them with the world! If you want your users to play by the rules, it’s essential they have a clear understanding of them. Typically, you’ll want to ensure the users receive your guidelines when registering. We recommend including your mission statement and a link to your guidelines and an FAQ page just above the conversation for easy reference. Having your guidelines live on a dedicated page of your site can also be helpful for internal reference and dealing with complaints, so make sure you’ve got them laid out in a way that’s easy to navigate – consider subheadings for each category outlined above, with specific examples where possible.

4. Enforce the Guidelines

Now comes the messy part – outlining the penalties for failing to follow the rules. This can be especially tricky, depending on your revenue model. Enforcing a zero-tolerance policy can be more difficult when dealing with paid subscribers than anonymous users. Still, it’s crucial that users know they are responsible and accountable for their behavior on your site. As a best practice, we recommend defining different severities of offenses and how they are handled – a low-level offense such as name-calling might earn a short ban with a message reminding the user of how to engage:

Other mid-level offenses, such as offensive usernames or repetitive self-promotion, might use a three-strike and you’re out system, whereas doxxing or libelous comments might have zero tolerance. Wherever you land, defining the consequences and even preparing the messaging will ensure that your team is ready to copy and paste and be consistent in their messaging and that users know the rules aren’t just for show.

5. Start Moderating

Finally, crafting your guidelines is the easy part. The backbone to enforcing your guidelines and building communities is your moderation team. Whether this will be their primary role or yet another hat they wear, you’ll need to ensure you have team members on hand to ensure your guidelines are applied in a timely and consistent manner. Whether you handle moderation in-house or outsource it to a 3rd party, all moderators should undergo specific training that reviews your guidelines and their practical application and instills the ability to identify and manage unconscious bias. This will provide a more holistic understanding of the guidelines, empowering moderators to apply them more objectively. While hiring moderators can get expensive if your community is very active or posts controversial topics, an automatic content moderation solution can help maximize your resources.

Final Word

While creating a safe community in an online world can be a daunting challenge, starting with these five simple steps can help set you on the path to success.