Tag: Audience Engagement

Meet The Newest Way to Re-Engage Your Audience

Wouldn’t it be great if you could drive more user engagement on your digital properties without adding to your already endless workload? Viafoura’s new recirculation feature — a tool that highlights trending conversations around content — can do exactly that.  

The feature analyzes engagement velocity and content recency in order to recommend buzzing, active conversations to your digital community. As a result, audience members who actively engage with your community will easily find more content that interests them. 

For those of you who have yet to implement conversation tools on your digital properties, our data shows that that they can boost total time spent on site by 10%. 

Active comment readers spend the most time engaging with your digital properties. In fact, according to the Financial Times’ community manager, these users offer six times the engagement compared to non-comment readers. This means that they are extremely valuable members of your community. The recirculation widget exists to keep these users interacting with your content for even longer, and has proven to generate up to seven times more pageviews from comment readers. 

Surprised? We’re not. Humans naturally want to socialize with others, whether that be offline or online. Conversation tools that are backed by effective moderation offer your audience members the opportunity to be social and build meaningful connections to your brand. Our new tool lets consumers who value discussions related to your content know where active conversations are taking place. Especially around topics that resonate the most with them.

And that translates into more on-site engagement for you.

A major North American newspaper recently implemented the recirculation widget on its digital properties. After just two weeks after activating the tool, the company saw significant growth. Not only did it experience a 44% increase in comments, it also saw a 34% increase in average session length and a 38% increase in total on-site engagement. 

“This feature is a new way for publishers to start increasing the participation of their active community members, which in turn boosts the time spent on their sites,” Dan Seaman, product director of engagement tools at Viafoura. 

The recirculation feature can also live anywhere on your site. Consider adding it below our Conversations tool, within a notifications bar or on the side rail of your homepage. Curious about what the tool looks like? Take a peek at it in action below:

Want to learn more about the tool? Ask us your questions or book a live demo of our recirculation here. 

RELATED: Viafoura Launches a Rapid Moderation Console for Media Organizations

Here’s How to Win Over Younger Audiences Before You Lose Their Attention For Good

At the moment, 64% of the earth’s population is made up of millennials (those born between 1981-1996) and Generation Z (those born after 1996). That means no matter how loyal your audience is to your media company, if you aren’t attracting younger consumers, you’re losing out on a huge portion of potential subscribers. Not to mention your existing audience is continuing to age out of your target demographic.

It isn’t hard to see why younger generations are becoming increasingly important to the future of your brand. But here’s the catch: millennials and Gen Zers are notorious for their short attention spans, and can’t easily be won over by ads and content. 

So what’s a media company to do in order to attract and retain them? 

We’ve gathered the top, tried-and-true ways to grab and hold the attention of Gen Y and Z. Take your business to the next level by applying these best practices to your company’s content strategy. 

A Flawless Mobile-First Experience

If you know anything about millennials and Gen Z, you probably know that they’re glued to their smartphones.

In fact, 40% of Gen Zers prefer streaming TV over their smartphones, and nearly 20% of millennials solely rely on their mobile devices for internet access. So when it comes to media, the user’s mobile experience is everything to younger audiences.

These individuals expect organizations to offer quick and seamless mobile experiences. Which means your website, app or video-streaming platform must be completely responsive to different device sizes and load content instantly. 

Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on a highly profitable audience that might have been loyal to your brand. 

Social Immersion Outside of Social Media

From the explosion of Facebook in the early 2000’s to the popularity of Snapchat and TikTok, it’s clear that generations Y and Z both value online social interaction.

But rather than allowing these interactions to happen on social media, bring this love for socialization right to your platform. That way, you can directly monetize their time spent interacting with one another. You can also generate consumer loyalty as they build meaningful connections to your platform.

Consider implementing moderated conversation, live chat or interactive blogging tools to give your visitors a way to be social on your platform.

Personalize the Experience

McKinsey and Company, an international consulting agency, conducted a survey and found that “Generation Z is not only eager for more personalized products but also willing to pay a premium for products that highlight their individuality.”

Since younger audiences have grown up in the midst of the digital age, they’re completely accustomed to being bombarded with content from hundreds of media companies. Great content is everywhere these days. So if you want your content to stand out from the competition, your user’s experience must be both unique and personal. 

“Young people are not a monolithic marketing segment,” states an article on Forbes. They expect media organizations to treat them as individual humans, not just a number. 

Want the solution? Simply look to your first-party data to determine how you can customize the experience according to the interests of your visitors. 

Amplify Your Brand’s Authenticity

Millennials and Gen Zers both value a certain degree of transparency and sincerity in their relationships not just with humans, but also with the companies they choose to support. 

“Gen Z craves a personal, authentic connection,” the editor of a report on Generation Z tells CNBC. “The key is to know your brand and evolve accordingly. Quick about-faces and trend-chasing will be seen for what they are.”

So connect with your younger audiences over topics and issues that matter not just to them, but also to your organization.

Fun Fact: Almost 90% of Generation Z prefers supporting companies that help out with social or environmental issues. 

Rely on Visual Content 

“With new voices and new platforms entering the media landscape by the minute, the competition for young people’s attention has never been greater,” VICE’s Senior VP of Global Insights says. 

Thankfully, visual content like GIFs, memes and most importantly, video, is richer than just text-based articles, and can reach consumers in a matter of seconds.

We’ve all seen how visual-only social media platforms have become extremely popular with younger generations, after all. Brands that want to effectively create loyal and younger audience members must learn to replicate engaging visual experiences on their own platforms. 

In general, to capture the attention of younger audiences, you need more than just great content and products — you need to offer exclusive, unique experiences.

Gaining your competitive edge for the 2020’s

Right now, media companies everywhere are racing to stay on top of the ever-evolving trends and technologies in the industry. But with the future constantly barrelling towards us, the most effective path to revenue isn’t always straightforward. As a result, many brands aren’t properly equipped to deal with digital challenges on the road ahead.

No one really knows for sure what the best practices in the media industry will look like in five, 10 or 15 years. What we do know, however, is that you are very capable of putting your best foot forward in setting yourself up for ongoing success.

So would you believe us if we told you that a few simple steps could protect your business?

Well, you’d better buckle up — we’re about to walk you through everything you need to do to futureproof your business. Prepare to gain an edge over your competitors.

1. Invest in New Sources of Revenue

For most media organizations, social media is no longer a reliable source of revenue. While social media proved to be a great source of revenue and digital traffic several years ago, constantly changing algorithms and brand-daming toxicity has since diminished the relationship between media and social platforms.

The best lesson we can take away from the history between media and big tech companies is that media organizations need to stop relying on third-parties to generate revenue from consumers. Instead, it’s important to continuously be testing and analyzing direct ways to earn revenue. Long-term stability will require a direct relationship with your audience, and the more ways you

“There is going to be a new crop of players… that accelerate because they understand how to connect content, commerce, and conversation,” the CEO of Barstool Sports tells the Digital Content Next association. “Companies that do that are going to be in a good spot.”

Sustainable revenue models are now shifting away from ad revenue and towards consumer revenue models, where brands have complete access to their digital community and profits. Gain a competitive edge and set your brand up for success by monetising your audience directly.

2. Optimize Your Platform for Engagement

Whether you’re a news publisher or operate a video-streaming platform, building loyalty among your audience members translates into long-term success. That said, social engagement is a powerful building block of trust and loyalty in a digital community.

So instead of trying (and failing) to grow loyal followers via social media, incorporate engagement tools right into the fabric of your brand’s platform. Intertwine tools like live conversations, real-time blogging, ratings and reviews as well as live chats with your content to get people seriously interested in what you offer.

Add additional layers of interaction to your platform by engaging with your audience directly, through digital Q&As, personalized emails and recommended content lists. By having popular journalists or TV personalities chat with your audience, you can generate excitement in your community and prove that your content is worth the subscription fee.

At the end of the day, you don’t want to be a stranger to your audience. Interacting with them shows that they mean more to you than money. And that, folks, is how to generate long-term trust, no matter what kind of curveball the future may throw at you.

3. Set Up Preventative Moderation Measures

Nevermind the future, the present is already volatile.

There are trolls, bots, spammers and misinformation wreaking havoc throughout the internet. So if you can’t protect your brand in the face of existing threats, how can you possibly be prepared to deal with these growing issues in the future?

In both the present and future, moderation across your user-generated content is a must for any brand hoping to draw in active subscribers and retain them.

For a moment, picture sports fans debating over a penalty during a live stream of a game. A real-time chat, where individuals exchange passionate thoughts, is a perfect opportunity for building community engagement around this event. However, a troll can easily ruin the experience by taunting, mocking and harassing your loyal users. This is why it’s essential to put some kind of moderation in place to protect your community.

Explore the different types of moderation here.

4. Implement the Perfect Conversion Strategy

According to a new report by What’s New In Publishing, consumer subscription fatigue is becoming a reality for many publishers and streaming platforms alike. Creating an effective conversion strategy matters now more than ever with so much competition fighting over consumer dollars.

So once you have your paywall and engagement tools in place, it’s time for you to connect all of the moving pieces together. Plant those seeds of engagement to grow your audience. Then ensure your engagement and paywall solutions are working together so that your active, subscription-ready users can be sent a paywall message.

Finding the right strategy for your business may take a bit of trial and error. But testing out different ways to engage, target and monetize your audience members is a surefire way to boost revenue in the long run.

5. Put Your Audience First

In the digital age, your audience is everything. Which is why you should pull every possible piece of information you can about your audience members from your first-party data, and use those insights to your advantage.

Take the time to identify who your most loyal audience members are, and how to best cater to them. For instance, OTT platforms may want to consider personalizing the content-streaming experience, with recommended or related videos.

Your content strategy should be geared towards what subscribers find important and relatable. So: figure out who you’re serving, what content and experience they value, and invest heavily in that.

Condé Nast has also developed a short exercise for publishers that can help your team shift its editorial strategy towards a more audience-oriented approach.

“Anything that distracts a publisher from focusing on their most loyal audiences, is a losing strategy,” reads a report by the Tow Center of Digital Journalism.

Wise words for media organizations everywhere.

Newsrooms: The One Thing That Will Make or Break Subscriber Conversion Metrics

News media organizations are in a constant state of transformation and reinvention. Whether they drive revenue through ads, memberships, metered access, hard paywalls and everything in between, the most successful news brands all have one thing in common. They recognize that one of the most effective, yet overlooked keys to deepening reader time on site and content consumption — the main indicator of a consumer’s readiness to subscribe — lies in activating reader passions through on-site social interactions.

A recent white paper issued by the Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute looked at over 500 U.S. newspaper brands from 2011 to 2018. In the white paper, it was shown that over 57% of newspaper brands have already tightened up their paywalls to offer each reader five free articles or less per month.

Unsustainable business model

Despite this, only news brands above the 80th percentile in this study reported having a “sustainable” digital business. Those reporting a “thriving” business are in even rarer circles, at or above the 90th percentile. In this category, news publishers have their paywalls typically “stopping” more than 6% of their monthly unique visitors to ask them to start paying. 

So what exactly does this mean for the majority of newspaper brands that aren’t in the top-performing ten percent? In simple terms, it indicates that not enough of the online readership is sufficiently engaged by number of articles read in a month to trigger a paywall offer — and from there it’s pretty simple math: Fewer readers get stopped, leading to fewer readers subscribing. That contributes to lower than expected subscriber conversion metrics.

How to maximize the stop zone?

So the big question then becomes: “How can we drive more readers into the “stop zone?” Most newsrooms have already been feeling the squeeze of increased demands and declining budgets — so the answer to this existential question will also need to keep this challenge in mind.

All of the typical go-to strategies a newsroom can employ, such as hiring more journalists; creating more or longer-form content; augmenting content with related media/infographics or repackaging content in new ways, are all fairly costly to undertake, in both dollars and invested time.

Engage your readers instead

Fortunately, this challenge can be solved by updating other parts of the modern news reader’s experience, which requires little to no additional oversight from the newsroom.

We analyzed the behaviors of over 300 million users who interact with Viafoura tools on more than 600 news platforms worldwide. By looking into this subscription conversion data, we found that when readers are truly ready to start paying for news, they spend inordinate amounts of time reading comments and interacting with other readers. These engaged readers typically spend more time on site and consume more content than any other cohort, and find themselves in the “stop zone” sooner than passive readers.

Given the unprecedented success that major social networks have at capturing audiences and driving revenue, this insight should come as no surprise. It also provides the means for news readers to interact with others who share and sometimes oppose their views in a civil manner. This civil, social experience lets readers feel connected to a broader community of diverse voices and ideas. 

Sticky value exchange

A full-featured community engagement suite has the power to create a “sticky” value exchange among readers and news brands, driving up time spent and loyalty among those readers most ready to pay for access to news.

Other key observations from our internal data include:

  • Our community engagement suite increases engaged time on site by 32% among those who are most likely to subscribe.
  • News readers who are socially engaged on site drive 25x more pageviews and attention time than those who just read content.

Social interaction taps into a deep-rooted biological human need. The world’s top-performing news brands are social in nature too, leveraging reader engagement tools like: live group chats around the hottest topics, live commenting that automatically kills toxic posts, and ask-an-expert-style experiences to engage their most passionate fans and grow their audiences into loyal communities. 

For more best practices on creating an effective engagement and to improve subscription conversion strategy, access our free webinar.

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What We Can Learn From Pirate Sites

Currently, the internet is littered with pirate sites that offer viewers free, often illegal access to TV shows, movies, live sports and music. These sites also include audience engagement solutions to build invested communities. What consumers often fail to realize though, is that by streaming something for free, their seemingly insignificant action becomes part of a much larger problem: billions of people are contributing to digital theft. That theft is making it extremely challenging for content owners and legitimate streaming services to succeed. 

MUSO, an anti-piracy watchdog organization, found that just this past June the movie Detective Pikachu was downloaded a whopping four million times via pirate sites. That’s a potential four million consumers that should be (but probably aren’t) paying to watch the movie in theaters or accessing it through subscription services.

“It would seem that a lot of modern-day pirates are merely frazzled parents who wouldn’t dream of stealing their Friday night bottle of chilled Riesling from the grocery store but don’t want to pay the same amount to watch the latest TV phenomenon,” says Andy Chatterley, MUSO’s CEO. “Online piracy is like taking candy from a baby.”

Unfortunately, pirate sites tend to offer more than an often all-encompassing library of media: they’re also experts at providing a great user experience for their visitors. Streaming something illegally is almost too easy thanks to their audience engagement solutions. 

If media streaming service providers want to be successful in this highly competitive climate, here’s what they need to do before they can walk in the right direction: 

Leverage an Audience Engagement Solution

One area that pirate sites excel at is building communities around their content. While regular streaming providers can’t compete with the breadth of content found within pirate sites, they can do a better job at engaging and building their own communities.

Many of these pirate sites rely on commenting tools and comment forums like Reddit, where consumers often go to find illegal streams. Highly engaging conversations are then built as people say thanks to those who provide the streams as well as comment on the overall quality and content. By providing people with valuable content, and engaging them, pirate sites are able to convert visitors into loyal community members and advocates.

Some pirate sites also use commenting as well as rating and review tools to allow their community members to help flag bad or fake files. This helps to build up visitors’ trust towards these platforms and encourages them to return.

Although these pirate sites spark an impressive audience engagement solution, it’s mostly based on people exchanging ideas over what content is worth stealing — which is a type of engagement that you don’t want to have on your platforms.

So why not beat these pirate sites at their own game? Give people valuable content that is enhanced with opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations. In other words, giving them a platform to engage with one another will allow them to form relationships around the content that they like or dislike.

Streaming experiences can then be enhanced. Think about implementing moderated commenting tools, live chats for sports or event coverage, live blogging or ratings and reviews.

Audiences love viewing your content and love talking about their favorite content. Make sure both of those activities are happening on your platforms.

Collect Data to Personalize the Experience

When it comes to an audience engagement solution for streaming service providers, personalization is key to building a superior experience for consumers.

Take sports games, for instance. The ability to target content based on a fan’s favorite team or player will allow you to significantly improve their experience just by understanding their likes and dislikes.

Pirate sites are completely free to users, which also means visitors often don’t need to login or develop an account to consume content. Those who visit pirate sites even make an effort to protect their identities using tools like VPNs or incognito mode. As a result, the majority of their audience is anonymous. Their visitors also run the risk of being infected by malware as many pirate sites make money by allowing hackers to put malicious code onto their platforms.

And that gives media organizations an advantage: the ability to create a much more personalized and pleasant user experience.

First-party audience engagement data will help you to not only curate a highly-relevant selection of content for consumers, but it will also allow you to understand general behavior on your platform to inform your content, subscription and retention strategies.

As you get to know your audience’s interests and build loyalty-driving habits, you can also identify which users are no longer engaging with your content and are likely to churn. This information can then be used to send your known users exclusive content, a custom offer or discount to keep them invested in your brand.

Pirate sites aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So give consumers a compelling reason to dish out some money in exchange for your content.

Interested in learning more about audience engagement solutions? Then check out this article: Audience Engagement Data is About to Amp Up Sports Media.

A Closer Look at the True Cost of Open-Source Technology

When it comes to building a new tool for your digital properties in-house, there’s a lot to get excited about: like customization opportunities and the chance for your developers to put together their next masterful creation. But building a tool from scratch — especially a tool that exists to engage and grow your digital community — isn’t a simple walk in the park… even with the help of open-source code.  

The truth is, there’s a whole range of responsibilities that go into building and maintaining a community management tool aside from just integrating free code into your platform. The digital landscape is constantly shifting, which means that whatever is implemented needs to be adjusted every so often to respond to new technical limitations and best practices.  

If you’re currently deciding whether to build your own community management tool using open-source code, we’ve broken down exactly what goes into building and maintaining it:

High demand on your technical team

Open-source code is free to use. However, there are plenty of hidden costs that need to be considered.

“It isn’t free if half of your team is working on integrating it,” says Eric Liang, Viafoura’s director of Engineering. “Your team will need to spend time customizing it for your properties, your tech stack, your analytics and ensure a smooth integration. Or, you may want to hire a team to integrate it for you, which means you’ll need the budget for it.”

According to Soltech, a company that creates custom software and support for businesses, “most custom enterprise software projects fall somewhere between the $75,000 and $750,000 mark to design, develop and implement.”

Quality matters. In other words, your community management tool needs to be customized, maintained and optimized for different amounts of web traffic. Before you begin building onto an open-source tool, plan out the amount of time, staff and skill needed for the entire process.  

The importance of first-party data

There’s a good reason why it’s important that your tools deliver first-party data to clients. The more data you have from your platform’s visitors, the more you’ll come to understand their behaviors and the types of content they like to consume.

In addition, Deloitte found that “the best-in-class companies successfully use audience data to drive revenue, and record market-leading financial performance.”

One of the perks to using a software as a service (SaaS) solution is that many of them use APIs – tools for building and integrating software components – to give you access to your first-party data in a secure way. This data can then be analyzed to determine how users are interacting with your brand, content and other users.

If you’re planning to take on an open-source community engagement tool, you’re going to need a way to access that data. You may want to implement several open-source tools or build a custom solution to do so and then figure out where to store the data.

Ultimately, any knowledge you can get about your brand’s community is power, especially in the digital world. 

An article from MediaPost even states that “91% of people are more likely to shop with brands providing them with relevant recommendations and experiences.”

Are you ready to put thousands of hours into support?

In order to host a new tool on your domain, and maintain positive user experience, there must be a plan in place for regular updates and support.

“We have highly skilled team members monitoring and maintaining infrastructure, fixing bugs, working with customers, and testing regressions between 5000 and 6000 hours a year,” Liang explains. “By providing round-the-clock support for our customers, their communities cannot be overlooked.”

While it may not be feasible to sacrifice so much of your team and company’s time to support your own tool, be sure to have preventative measures in place to deal with bugs and respond to customers. Without long-term support, you could be left with frustrated users who feel abandoned by your company if your system ever breaks.  

Moderation is a must

As soon as you open your digital properties to commenting and live chat or blogging tools, you’re going to have to mitigate a few major obstacles: spam, political influencers, trolls and any other type of toxic comments.

It’s important to keep social interactions as civil as possible. That way, you can provide a safe environment for visitors to engage with on your domains. Whether you decide to use a third-party moderator or task your own team with monitoring the flood of daily comments is up to you.

Consider investing in intelligent moderation services to save your business time and focus on what you truly excel at: building out great content.  

A backup plan is always required

When you rely on free tools or plugins to manage your community, it’s worth making sure you have a backup plan… just in case it ever fails.

According to reports earlier this year, even Facebook’s popular commenting plugin failed iOS users.

It just goes to show that if you’re building out a community management tool, there’s no such thing as a quality shortcut. Although open-source tools are helpful to a certain extent, putting in that short-term and long-term legwork is essential to its success.

The Athletic’s Commitment to Engagement is Attracting Investors and Readers to its Ad-Free Publications

If you’re a diehard sports fan, you’ve probably at least heard about The Athletic by now.

Those who have subscribed for U.S. $3 to $4 per month have discovered a rich trove of city-based sports coverage that has begun to fill the void left by the dwindling number of newspapers that historically provided a daily sports fix.

Since going live in January 2016, The Athletic has expanded to 47 cities in Canada and the U.S. It’s also diversified beyond written online stories with podcasts and video products — all without a single dollar of ad revenue. Investors have taken note, likely enticed by the strong and growing community The Athletic has engaged.

The Shifting Sports Media Landscape

The company earned headlines from the get-go when it announced the U.S. $2.3 million in seed funding that its founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann had landed. Then again for its gradual recruitment of top-tier sports journalists from older, more established companies like Sports Illustrated and The Globe and Mail (both of which have seen their sports pages reduced in recent years).

Traditional media’s shrinking page count doesn’t mean there’s no competition for The Athletic. Established broadcasters such as ESPN, TSN and theScore carry big-time brand recognition online, and more sprawling media brands, like MSN and Yahoo, offer free sports content through various platforms.

James Mirtle, editor-in-chief of The Athletic Canada, says The Athletic’s stories gather “a different slice” of sports fandom compared to other media companies. “We’re doing something more analytical than what you’d do at a free website. You can tell because the comment section is usually more civil,” he says.

Those readers are regularly engaged through means that most will find familiar in 2019 — each reporter is active on social media (table stakes in modern journalism). But The Athletic has also formalized a Q&A regimen that regularly invites subscribers to connect with its experts.

“Initially, it was ad hoc,” says Taylor Patterson, director of communications at The Athletic. “A writer and editor would tackle a live Q&A for an hour, with the editor fielding the questions and the writer responding in real-time.”

But the company soon invested in expanding the in-house tool its product engineers built to facilitate this discussion, improving the UI and making it look “more professional,” Patterson says. The marketing team also hired a full-time community manager to oversee Q&As and build a calendar to coincide with season starts, playoffs, and other chat-worthy events.

The discussions are now a fleshed-out editorial program that averages 15 discussions each week across the network.

Active Subscribers = Retention

Mirtle says that the company has found that when “subscribers are active, taking part in the Q&As and the comment section, they’re much less likely to cancel their subscription. So we’re really invested in that.” Patterson also explains that approximately 80% of the subscriptions that come due each year are getting renewed.

The Athletic crested the 100,000-subscriber mark in 2018. At that time, industry watchers did some quick, back-of-the-envelope math and estimated average annual subscriber revenues between U.S. $6 million and $8 million.

It’s also worth noting that in the 12 months since breaking 100,000 subs, The Athletic has expanded to a dozen new markets to offer local coverage on every team in the NBA, NFL, and NHL and has added NASCAR to its mix.

Even if that revenue doesn’t cover costs yet, investors have not been hiding their checkbooks. Investment and funding information platform Crunchbase pegged The Athletic’s total funding (so far) at U.S. $89.5 million following its sixth round in May 2019. Whatever data those investors are seeing, it’s keeping their wallets open.

Overall, the company is confident that regular engagement with its passionate readers is the key to growth. As Patterson puts it, “when people feel they can connect on a personal level with something they read about every day — and can express their opinions on the topic — people are inclined to stick with it.”

Want a Higher Reader Retention Rate? Look to Your Commenting Section

How do you get readers to stay on your site longer, read more articles and engage with your digital community?

Earlier this year, we did a deep dive into three months of anonymous, aggregate data from our media partners. The goal was to learn — and share — insights around how reader activity in comment sections has an impact on visitor retention and engagement.

In our data dive, we looked at over two billion pageviews on publisher pages in the first quarter of this year. We learned that readers who were logged into Viafoura spent over two million hours on customer domains and 565,595 hours in comment sections.  

We then compared logged-in users to those who were not in order to identify how their behavior differed. The findings:

We also looked at how audiences engage with others when logged in. In analyzing nearly 2.5 million actions on more than 430,000 comments, we discovered that people are a little nicer than you might initially think: 

Our findings illustrate that comment sections allow for civil, real-time conversations, creating a highly engaged community of authors, readers and influencers. These individuals can then turn into paying subscribers if your website is properly moderated. In other words, real-time commenting enhances audience engagement, which can build reader loyalty in your brand’s online community. 

Through our suite of products, our partners can access first-party data for real-time commenting behavior, content consumption habits and more. This allows our customers to measure the impact engagement has on brand loyalty, and drive meaningful business value.

Request a demo to learn how Viafoura can help your organization build an engaged community.

A Socially Engaged News Network That Doesn’t Depend on Social Media

Over the past decade, the ubiquitous and overwhelming phenomenon that is social media has rocked the world of traditional journalism to its core. A reporter today who isn’t on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat is something of a dinosaur.

Catherine Badalamente knows better than most about just how profound the changes have been. She’s spent the last six years as the vice president of Digital Media at Graham Media. The company operates seven award-winning television stations and associated online media hubs in Houston, Detroit, San Antonio, Jacksonville (FL) and Orlando. It has been recognized within the industry as a news leader in digital media and technology development.

Badalamente has worked hard to embrace new, interactive technologies in an effort to make Graham Media a prime resource for the local communities it serves. With year-to-year growth of 29% in daily average users over the past five months, it seems that hard work is paying off.

Using Social to Get People off of Social — and onto Graham Media

Badalamente admits that social media engagement is a key piece of the puzzle for Graham Media — but it’s not the only piece. Rather than the final goal, Badalamente sees social media engagement as a tool to drive readers to the company’s own platforms.

“We can’t control our content on social media,” says Badalamente. She explains that tech giants like Facebook or Instagram can change their algorithms on a whim. Media companies, like Graham Media, optimize content to get maximum exposure considering the social network’s algorithms, and when something changes, the content may not be seen by as many viewers.

“It can be dangerous to put too much energy into platforms that make decisions about how our content is exposed,” says Badalamente. “Instead, we’re using social media to direct users back to us.”

An Interactive Plan in Action

Graham Media’s KPRC Channel 2 in Houston recently put this strategy into action while covering the story of missing four-year-old Maleah Davis. A KPRC reporter used a Viafoura live question-and-answer widget to ask the public for questions about the case, and then answered those questions in real time.

“I followed it live from Detroit, and it was so compelling because the audience asked amazing questions,” says Badalamente. The network then advertised through social media that the questions and answers would be reported that night on the evening news.

“It was real and interactive,” Badalamente added.

And most importantly, it directed viewership back to Graham Media’s own platform — the evening news. It’s one part of a larger strategy that Badalamente says is responsible for the 34% increase in digital revenue Graham Media experienced in 2018.

Created by an Algorithm, Driven by the Community

Making the news interactive is another key component of Badalamente’s plan to make Graham Media the first place its communities turn to for hyperlocal coverage — before social media.

“People aren’t satisfied with simply consuming the news,” says Badalamente. “They have an expectation that they will be contributing to the conversation.”

To create a venue for these conversations, Badalamente is targeting what she describes as “communities of interest.” A community of interest could be a geographical location like a neighbourhood, or a local hero – Aretha Franklin in Detroit, for example – or even a simply hobby like fishing. Graham Media uses a specially-designed aggregation tool that monitors internet traffic for topics that are of interest to the local community served by a particular television station.

When the tool finds a topic that is generating traffic in a particular community, it automatically generates a page on the relevant station’s website. It then gathers content on that subject both from within Graham Media’s platforms and from the internet at large and fills the auto-generated page with the latest relevant news on that topic.

The specialized aggregation tool has only been running for a year, but Badalamente is already seeing results. Graham Media app downloads increased by 19.6% over the past month to 131,254 downloads, and auto-generated pages have begun popping up in the networks’ most-viewed sections.

“No one is lifting a finger,” says Badalamente. “It’s very exciting.”

Now that the system is in place, it’s time to take the next step. Graham Media will search for local individuals who are heavily invested in a particular community of interest, and will make them facilitators who can help organize and share a page’s content.

“How can we build a passionate, invested audience?” Asks Badalamente. “By becoming a gateway to information for the community.”

With Badalamente at the helm, Graham Media is doing just that. The user base is growing, and with it, the company’s bottom line – year-to-year revenue is up 39%.

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