community engagement Archives | Page 4 of 5

Online Community Manager: Job Description, Jobs & Salaries

The digital world we live in has changed the way people interact with companies and how they make purchases. Now, with the spreading influence of online communities and their increasing role in building a brand identity, building a brand’s reputation and awareness online is a must these days, including social media and organic presence, among many other things.

Companies need a savvy online community manager to help build a reputation as a community-based brand and engage with their audience. In addition, an online community manager can help build trust, position a brand, and improve user engagement. Think about it as a role that creates a bridge between a brand and its customers. They act as a moderator that serves as a spokesperson for the brand and communicates intent between them.

What Does An Online Community Manager Do?

A community manager is a person who usually is working closely with the Digital Marketing department. They are responsible for ensuring all the content follows the set guidelines and expanding the brand’s online community. This usually means they will also be in charge of implementing the digital engagement strategies. It is important for a community manager to understand what sets a community apart from an ordinary audience online.

The good thing about this position is that it requires skills that you can gain through different degrees. This means that it doesn’t matter whether you are a journalist or a public relations specialist – as long as you meet the requirements, you can apply to and find success in this position.

But before you start sending your resume to different companies, take a look at the online community manager job description.

Online Community Manager Job Description

An online community manager is responsible for building, growing, nurturing, and managing online communities. This role entails performing community management around a specific brand or purpose.

Online Community Manager vs. Social Media Manager

Even though the tasks of an online community manager and social media manager are similar, these are two different positions. The critical difference between the online community manager job and social media manager job is how they interact with the audience.

While the former is responsible for communicating as a brand, promoting products and services, an online community manager is responsible for the entire holistic brand strategy in the digital landscape.

As such, while these roles may end up merging depending on the company you work for, they carry different responsibilities. However, their core responsibility remains engaging an online community to its fullest potential.

Tasks of an Online Community Manager

Here are some of the basic tasks that an online community manager is responsible for carrying out. Bear in mind that the list of functions is not exhaustive.

Managing a community

Online community managers are responsible for fostering a sense of community around a brand by actively engaging with the audience. As part of their tasks, community managers need to monitor the user engagement level, set community guidelines and perform additional tasks such as identifying influencers in the industry for possible collaboration purposes. In other words, the community managers main job is to optimize the companies digital community for success.

Engage with users directly

One of the responsibilities of an online community manager is looking for loyal followers who like the brand and engage with them. They can do this by leaving comments on their posts or answering their questions on the official profile. Community managers are also able to elevate the quality of online discussions, as well as sustain meaningful relationships with the audience. Real conversations with the audience can turn into a catalyst for growth in your publications. If you want to learn more you can watch this Webinar: How CBC Creates Real Conversations Below the Fold

Solving problems

If you have built an online community for your brand with clear guidelines, problems will sometimes still occur between members. A community manager will have to declare the final word on issues and take action in case of broken policies. However, a community manager can take advantage of automatic tools such as content moderation platforms that allow the software to perform moderation with oversight from the community manager.

Managing social media

Online community managers need to stay ahead of the competition on social media, looking out for trends within the industry. Further, an online community manager needs to deal with the press and any legal issues regarding the brand’s image online.

Maintaining optimal performance and accuracy of content

Online community managers are also involved in publishing content on the site and driving organic traffic. Therefore, they need to make sure that all the information displayed on the site is relevant and up-to-date and double-check that there are no discrepancies between the website, social media platforms, and the blog in terms of information.

Online Community Manager Salary

The average online community manager’s salary is $44,214. However, if you are an entry-level candidate, you’ll need to expect a lower remuneration starting at $35,000.

Online Community Manager Jobs

Whenever proceeding down a career path, it’s crucial to evaluate future opportunities, which means investigating potential opportunities to grow within the industry.

If you start as an Online Community Manager, you have the option of progressing to a Marketing Manager or Content Strategist with time. However, you can also choose to specialize in online platforms and work as a Digital Marketing Manager. Once you have sufficient experience and knowledge within these roles, you may one day qualify for the role of a Social Media Director.

How to Increase Website Engagement: 5 Ideas Included

As Generation Z and Millennials make increasing contributions to global shopping trends, it only makes sense that they are driving the online shopping revolution. With more than 2 billion people making their purchases online, it’s loud and clear that the web is the place to be for global companies.

However, with the abundance of online products and services, modern companies need to find a way to stand out amongst the thousands of websites. It’s easy for your web platform to fall into obscurity if you aren’t engaging with visitors to your website and converting them to loyal subscribers.

If you’re wondering if optimizing site engagement is necessary when you already have good website traffic, we can assure you that it definitely is! Website engagement is critical since it’s the key to converting visiting traffic into members of your online community.

This article will discuss some fundamental audience engagement concepts and how you can incorporate them into your web platform and foster a growing online presence.

What Is Site Engagement?

Website engagement is the process of building relationships with your customers to create a community around your brand, which you can then interact and participate in to foster trust and brand loyalty . An engaged audience is more likely to continue to use your products and services, and is more likely to share your brand within their communal circles, which helps attract more like-minded people to your site.

You can build relationships with your customers on the site through different methods. Below are some key links between your brand and your customers that have a lot of influence on web engagement.

Content

Web content is the backbone of the material that your community will read over, discuss, comment on, and share. This means it’s vital that you provide content that is interesting, relevant, and as close to what your audience wants as possible. These can be updated on specific programs, new products or services available for your audience, community spotlights, and more.

It’s also important to provide content at a steady, reliable pace, as this is a big part of what makes your audience revisit your website and increases overall web engagement. In addition, this lays the foundation for the establishment of a community within which your users can feel included.

Social-media style features

Social media is popular for a good reason; they utilize several popular functions and tools to foster community engagement. Using social media style features such as likes and follows, comments, community posts, news feeds, and engagement carousels are a great way to get your community involved in your brand and creating a buzz about what you have to offer.

Through use of an online community engagement and management software, you can employ many of the tools we’ve mentioned to increase community engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about these features, check them out here to learn more about how to use them within your own web platform.

Active participation

In addition to providing tools for your audience to engage with your content and their fellow members, it’s also important to note that as a brand, your contributions to the community’s growth are just as important, if not more, than those of your users. Your audience wants to know that you care about their opinions, and that you’re willing to directly engage with them regarding their praise, feedback, complaints, and contributions.

Make sure to assign someone to manage your community and engage with them regularly, if not daily, and regularly go over the audience engagement data to examine what your community has to say about your brand.

Website Engagement Analytics

Now that you understand what web engagement is, you need to know how to process the data you receive from your platform to adjust and modify your engagement strategy.

Some of the metrics that you can check regularly include page views, time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, and new visitors. These can be easily accessible via Google Analytics, and it is strongly recommended and if you’re not already doing so, to utilize this tool to analyze data and make informed decisions on how to continue to promote site engagement.

How To Increase Website Engagement

This section will talk about five effective tips that you can use to increase your site engagement. This is not a comprehensive list, but it will go a long way towards resolving any major complications that are proving to be a roadblock for your web engagement.

Faster page loading

Let’s say you are looking for something on Google. What happens if the page you click on takes a long time to load? Chances are, you are going to bounce back and select another result. This is definitely something you want to avoid; your website should load in two to three seconds as a rule of thumb. If that’s not the case, then you are potentially losing traffic and chances at community growth.

There are numerous ways to improve the loading time of your website, such as image compression, combining files, avoiding redirects and reducing HTTPS requests. Talk to your web designer/programmer to discuss how you can optimize page load speeds to ensure your web traffic successfully reaches your platform.

Simplify your navigation

Your users need to reach any part of your website within two to three clicks to increase web engagement. Therefore, you should create an easy structure for them to navigate; in this regard, many people focus on internal linking. This is how you direct the users from one part of your site to the other. You can do this using images, CTAs, and even navigation links embedded in your content. Make sure that you are linking to other pages on your site in a natural way to provide value for your customers and help them find similar content to what they’re interested in seeing.

Mobile friendly

Today, most web users prefer using mobile devices to browse the web and engage with the web platforms. This means that it is vital that your website be properly optimized for mobile users.

There are several steps to creating a mobile-friendly website, such as format optimization, making navigation easy through the internal linking strategy we explained above, and testing if everything is in order through Google’s mobile-friendly test. Any issues outlined need to be addressed by your web developer.

Adding chatbox

Providing a chatbox service can be a great way for users to get the answers to frequently asked questions and narrow down where they need to be to find content. Using a live chatbox service is a great way to increase audience engagement by having users communicate with your brand’s reps directly through your platform. Having one of these on your site is one of the most powerful website engagement tools.

Guide users

Guiding your users can help your online engagement while achieving conversions at the same time. Here, you will need to use different CTAs (call-to-action) that are persuasive while avoiding direct commands. For instance, instead of a button that says “Buy Now,” use words such as “Subscribe” and “Learn More.” As a result, users are less pressured to decide and won’t feel that they need to commit to your brand right away. This also does wonders for fostering trust and a sense of community because the user feels valued as an individual and not a sales figure. It is key to regularly go over key engagement tool metrics in order to keep up to date with the current state of your sites online engagement.

Study your audience

Your audience are living, breathing people, with their own individual tastes and preferences. There’s a lot of information you can obtain from them when they visit your website, and you can put that information to good use by customizing their experience with you when they return from time to time. Using tools like Google Analytics can be a great way to visualize your audience’s behaviours, and on a personal level, using cookie data to suggest content similar to their previous choices allows for simple personalization that makes it much more likely that they remain engaged with your brand and website.

We hope this has been useful in helping you come up with your own website engagement strategies. We also recommend you check out our webinar on a new approach to engagement and our suite of online community management solutions to learn more about how they can help you construct your virtual community and increase overall site engagement for your organization.

How To Build An Online Community

Businesses face an ever-expanding digital consumer market, and it’s important to adapt to this shift in user preferences and respond with the provision of a well-designed, web-based platform that offers a unique and customized customer experience. The key to success lies in establishing a reliable web presence that inspires trust, loyalty, and a sense of community around your brand, which makes it extremely important to know how to build an online community for yourself.

There are a lot of benefits that come with building an online community; an increased ROI, a base of loyal customers, and a surge in brand awareness. Regardless of the industry, brand, or market sector, well-built virtual platforms that can sustain a growing, engaged community are a tremendous asset to your business and should be highly prioritized within your marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll go over what an online community is and examples of the various types, how to build an online community, and some of the best practices for when you’ve put together your own.

What is An Online Community

An online community revolves around bringing people together around a specific concept, subject, or purpose. Depending on your organizational goals and the digital platform you choose, your users could share their opinions about a topic, go over educational resources, and even collaborate on projects.

So when you decide to build an online community, the first thing you have to consider is its purpose. To help you sort this out, here are some examples of online communities modeled around specific goals.

Interest-based community

As you might have guessed, these communities form around shared interests, hobbies, or pursuits. These are usually formed around recreational activities, and people in these communities are passionate about its basis. For instance, book clubs, wine tasters, coffee blend aficionados and sports fans are all great examples of this type of community.

Geographic location-based community

It is common to see these communities formed in small neighborhoods or towns. They’re usually built around a sense of neighbourhood, and often involve posting updates on the happenings around the neighbourhood, ranging from information regarding community projects, the best places to eat, and public service announcements.

Profession-based community

Some online communities are dedicated to connecting people that work in the same industries to share tips, solve problems, and find work. These groups share similar experiences in their work life, and their members can understand the unique challenges or circumstances that come with the profession, which can make them particularly well-knit at times.

Learning-based community

These types of communities are very common, and its members are brought together after they subscribe to a course or purchase a membership for an instructional or educational program. Some examples of this include communities built around continuing education courses, language study, and vocational training. These communities benefit from exchanging information, knowledge, and study materials with their peers.

Brand-based community

These types of communities are the most relevant to business, retailers, and media brands looking to engage with their customer audience. They’re specifically built around the user’s shared experiences with a particular brand, and are usually fostered by feelings of satisfaction, loyalty, and pride that are a result of a great customer experience.

How To Create An Online Community?

Now that you’re aware of the benefits of creating an online community and how it can benefit both your brand and your audience, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to build an online community for your brand.

1. Choose the platform and outline your goals

As we mentioned before, the first thing you need to do is determine your brand goals and the purpose of the online community. This will probably align closely with your business goals, and will ultimately shape the way you engage with your audience and increase the appeal of your community.

2. Create guidelines

If you are going to build an online community, then you need to determine a set of rules to regulate the behavior of your members. Remember that you want to avoid any harassment, spam content, and illegal posts, and generally want to create a positive, brand-focused environment that makes your users excited about your content. Make these guidelines clear and readily available, and have systems and tools in place to enforce them when necessary.

3. Set up the community

Review some of the key features needed when figuring out how to create an online community. Ensure all the basics of user personalization are in-place, and make sure the tools your audience has access to for community engagement are functioning as intended. Ensure your content is separated by categories and tags so users can easily find the information they are looking for. Finally, also make sure your sign-in process is clear and bug-free so users can build their identities without issue.

4. Strategic engagement and community growth

A big part of engagement is input from your side as the brand. Engaging with your community by asking questions or proposing topics to discuss offers new sources of discussion, and your presence within the community will show your users that you’re taking an active, forward-facing role in its growth. Use the tools your audience does to promote discourse; like favorable posts, post comments and responses to questions, address complaints promptly and transparently. These are all great ways to develop community trust and growth.

Best Practices When Looking To Build An Online Community:

When it comes to building an online community, there are no shortcuts. Having an audience engagement strategy is the first step towards establishing a meaningful connection with your customers. Below are some of the best practices to keep in mind when creating your strategy for an online community.

Be Personable

The key to building a thriving digital community is by focusing on audience engagement. By nature, human beings want to connect and talk about things that matter to them, such as current events, their interests, or hobbies. Expressing what your organization stands for and infusing your brand’s unique perspective into your content can help connect with audience members who share the same views. This is the first step to building a lasting relationship with the members of your online community. Take the time you need to actively communicate with your audience and participate in the discourse, and you’ll see fantastic results in return.

Get to Know Your Audience

Providing an engaging digital space for your audience to engage and interact in requires both a keen understanding of community essentials as well as web elements and software. If you don’t have either of these, that’s okay!

At Viafoura, we offer an end-to-end platform that can help you engage with your web audience and convert them into members of a community. Our customizable and scalable solutions can help you convert first time visitors and unknown audiences into loyal subscribers. Check out our unique suite of solutions here to learn more about the ways in which online community management and engagement software can help you provide a unique experience for your audience.

Take Advantage of Tools

Building a community online comes with a number of responsibilities that can get daunting if you don’t utilize specialized tools. Connecting your social media tools to your online community platform can also be a challenge.

At Viafoura, we offer an end-to-end platform that can help you engage with your community and convert them into leads. Our customizable and scalable solution can help you uncover loyal subscribers and turn them into your brand’s ambassadors. Check out our unique platform here.

Grupo Clarín Upgrades Its Audience Engagement Solution With Viafoura

In pursuit of a new community-building partner, Grupo Clarín enlists the help of Viafoura to develop a highly active and lucrative digital audience.

TORONTO, ON, Jul. 21, 2021 — Grupo Clarín, the largest media producer in Argentina and one of the top Spanish news brands worldwide, and Viafoura, a leader in audience engagement and content moderation, today announced an ongoing partnership to forge stronger, long-lasting audience relationships. Replacing its previous audience engagement tool, Grupo Clarín is embracing Viafoura to improve user experiences on its website — and ultimately drive registrations and subscriptions.

Before turning to Viafoura, Grupo Clarín did not have an effective way to moderate Spanish conversations on its digital properties. Viafoura’s advanced moderation capabilities allow Grupo Clarin’s main sites clarin.com (News) and ole.com.ar (Sports) to automatically block up to 90% of offensive comments, facilitating positive and productive conversations.

By combining Viafoura’s AI-driven, multilingual moderation services with its social engagement tools, Grupo Clarín is starting to see the quality of on-site discussions improve.

“We were looking for more than a basic commenting platform; we needed a solution that could consistently drive civil engagement and loyalty on-site,” explained Marcelo Rizzi, Chief Technology Officer and Big Data at Grupo Clarín. “We liked how Viafoura could bring an intuitive social experience right to our websites, with real-time engagement features such as likes, shares, personalization and notifications.”

“At the end of the day, we chose Viafoura because of its superior functionality, business model and price,” Rizzi added.

“Viafoura’s Audience Engagement Suite is designed to add value across digital communities, boosting user engagement and brand loyalty,” stated Jesse Moeinifar, Viafoura’s founder and CEO. “With Viafoura, Grupo Clarín can continue to inject new growth opportunities into its business.”

About Viafoura

Viafoura partners with over 600 media brands to engage, convert and monetize their digital audiences. With best-in-class engagement and content moderation solutions — including real-time conversations, live blogs, community chat, personalization tools and AI-powered moderation — Viafoura helps companies create active, civil and loyal online communities. Advanced data analytics also offer customers access to unique and valuable insights into their audience’s behaviors and preferences. As a result, the Viafoura solution drives higher registrations and subscriptions as well as better-targeted content and advertising.

About Grupo Clarín

Grupo Clarín is the largest media company in Argentina and a leading company in printing, publishing, broadcasting and programming markets. Its flagship newspaper — Diario Clarín — is one of the highest circulation newspapers in Latin America. Grupo Clarín is the largest producer of media content in Argentina, including news, sports and entertainment and reaches substantially all segments of the Argentine population in terms of wealth, geography and age.

Clarín actualiza su solución de comentarios con Viafoura para mejorar la experiencia e interacción de sus usuarios

En la búsqueda de un nuevo socio de ‘community-building’, Grupo Clarín contrató los servicios de Viafoura para desarrollar una audiencia digital altamente activa y valiosa.

TORONTO, ON, 21 de julio, 2021 — Grupo Clarín, la empresa de medios más grande de la Argentina y una de las marcas líder de noticias en español a nivel mundial, y Viafoura, compañía líder en interacción de audiencias y moderación de contenido, anunciaron hoy una alianza para crear lazos más fuertes y duraderos con sus usuarios. Reemplazando su herramienta previa de interacción de audiencias, Grupo Clarín se une a Viafoura con el objeto de mejorar la experiencia de los usuarios en sus sitios web, y como consecuencia continuar creciendo en registros y suscripciones.

Antes de contactar a Viafoura, Grupo Clarín no contaba con una manera eficaz de moderar las conversaciones en sus propiedades digitales. Las tecnología de moderación utilizada por Viafoura le permiten ahora a los sitios principales del Grupo Clarin – clarin.com (Noticias) y ole.com.ar (Deportes)- bloquear automáticamente hasta el 90% de los comentarios ofensivos, facilitando de este modo las conversaciones positivas e interesantes.

Al combinar los servicios multilingües impulsados por la inteligencia artificial de Viafoura, con sus herramientas de interacción social, Grupo Clarín confirma cómo la calidad de las conversaciones de sus sitios mejora.

“Estábamos en la búsqueda de algo más que una plataforma básica de comentarios; necesitábamos una solución que pudiese manejar en forma consistente la interacción amable y la fidelidad en el sitio”, explicó Marcelo Rizzi, Chief Technology Officer and Big Data en el Grupo Clarín. “Nos pareció atractivo cómo Viafoura podía aportar una experiencia social intuitiva directamente a nuestros sitios web, con características de interacción en tiempo real, tales como ‘me gusta’, ‘compartir’, ‘personalización’ y ‘notificaciones’.”

“Al final del día, elegimos Viafoura debido a su funcionalidad superior, modelo de negocios y su valor”, agregó Rizzi.

“El paquete de interacción de audiencia de Viafoura está diseñado para agregar valor a las comunidades digitales, promoviendo la interacción de los usuarios y la fidelización del cliente a la marca”, anunció Jesse Moeinifar, fundador y CEO de Viafoura. “Con Viafoura, Grupo Clarín puede continuar inyectando nuevas oportunidades de crecimiento en sus negocios.”

Acerca de Viafoura

Viafoura se encuentra aliada a más de 600 Medios con el fin de interactuar, convertir y monetizar sus audiencias digitales. Contando con las mejores soluciones de interacción y moderación de contenido del mercado, incluyendo conversaciones en tiempo real, blogs en vivo, community chat, herramientas de personalización y moderación impulsadas mediante IA, Viafoura ayuda a las empresas a crear comunidades online leales, amigables y activas. Un análisis de datos avanzado, también ofrece a los clientes acceso a información única y valiosa acerca de los comportamientos y las preferencias de sus audiencias. Como resultado, la solución de Viafoura impulsa un mayor número de registros y suscripciones, así como también ayuda a que la publicidad y el contenido estén mejor dirigidos.

Acerca de Grupo Clarín

Grupo Clarín es la compañía de medios más grande de la Argentina y una empresa líder en los mercados de impresión, publicación, transmisión y programación. Su diario emblemático, el Diario Clarín, es uno de los diarios de mayor alcance en América Latina y llega sustancialmente a todos los segmentos de la población en términos de nivel socio-económico, geografía y edad.

The Independent Selects Viafoura To Foster Civil Discussion Across its Global Brands

The Independent is the latest publisher to replace its legacy commenting solution with Viafoura’s industry-leading suite of engagement tools to gain reader insights, build trust and create a more civil and interactive community

TORONTO, April 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — To support the continued emphasis on civil discourse and journalistic integrity, the leading UK publisher, The Independent, has selected the Viafoura audience engagement solution to build and nurture the reader communities of its premier global news sites, including The Independent, Evening Standard, Indy100 and Independent Español.

Viafoura’s digital experience platform enables publishers to go beyond commenting, and gain insight through actionable first-party data allowing companies to better understand their audiences. The Independent can deliver more personalized content experiences and marketing initiatives through Viafoura’s real-time conversations, live chat, content recommendations and personalized notifications.

The Independent selected Viafoura’s solution because of its ability to integrate the entire content creation and consumption cycle while also fostering civil discourse. The Independent has already seen an increase in civility, fewer articles getting flagged and reduced customer service complaints thanks to Viafoura’s AI-powered moderation service, advanced engagement and first-party data analytics. For example, Viafoura’s AI platform can detect if the term “snowflake” is being used in a benign way — in the context of a discussion of weather — or as an insult in a political discussion.

“We didn’t want to simply replace our old platform with a similar one; we were looking for game-changing technology that could improve reader engagement and provide us with a suite of features to help us build our communities and Viafoura gave us that,” said Jo Holdaway, Chief Data & Marketing Officer at The Independent. “By integrating the key moderation features with human interactions from launch, we are able to provide our journalists and community members a safe space where they can share their insight and opinions. The next phases of the roll-out will be based on the solid foundation of positive conversations.”

The Independent identified a need to own its visitor experience and other solutions were not able to integrate that experience across its platform like Viafoura. Publishers are quickly realizing that it is imperative to own their platforms and data so that they can provide a better and more personalized user experience.

“Viafoura lets publishers put reader engagement at the forefront of the relationship,” Viafoura CEO Jesse Moeinifar said. “For a news organization like The Independent, which has built its reputation on decades of quality and thorough journalism, having a platform that streamlines the cycle of discourse is crucial. Whether it is AI-powered moderation or delivering a truly customized experience through first-party data integration, publishers are able to utilize Viafoura to further the relationship between information source and the communities they serve.”

The Independent joins other major publishers such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Graham Media and Reach PLC who can engage their communities and deliver better content through actionable insights. To improve your community’s experience, please visit viafoura.com.

About Viafoura

About The Independent

The Independent has been at the frontline of journalism since its launch in 1986, with its mission to challenge and debate always ahead of its time. It is Britain’s biggest quality digital news brand and top 10 in the US. Publishing from 12 countries and in six languages The Independent is a truly global news organisation. Since The Independent became the UK’s first digital-only national newspaper in 2016, the brand continues to invest in and deliver high quality and trusted journalism while building out its data-driven products, services, audiences, and international presence.

Civilize & Monetize: How to Highlight Constructive vs. Toxic Comments

Spotlight:

A moderation strategy keeps your digital spaces safe, but should also include how to drive positive conversations
Positive, active communities are lucrative for publishers
1. 80% of all user registrations are triggered on pages that feature onsite engagement tools and user-generated content.
2. Registered users spend 225% more time-consuming media content per week.*
  1. *Viafoura study data collected Jan 2019 – May 2019, sampled 14 unique media brands, sampled 85M unique non-registered and 2.5M registered users
Help spark the conversation, pose thoughtful questions
Highlight positive community members, not only does it encourage more engagement, it shows the kind of engagement you’re looking for
Community guidelines must be clear and easily accessible to your community

Online social spaces exist to build value for your community members, generating engagement and loyalty toward your brand. And these tools are most effective when media organizations support them with the right strategies that maximize user activity.

A moderation strategy, for example, is necessary for businesses to keep their digital social spaces civil. But media companies must go beyond reducing offensive comments and trolls in their social spaces to facilitate ideal behavior from audience members.

“Just as it’s important to have a strategy in place to protect the quality of your on-site social spaces, it’s also crucial to have a strategy to drive positive conversation around your content,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation solutions at Viafoura.

In other words, if you want to drive positive behavior from your community members, you’ll need to take action by encouraging users to participate in meaningful, on-topic discussions.

The Value of Activating Productive Discussion

In the digital world, active communities are incredibly lucrative for media companies.

You can draw on your users’ engagement and behavioral data to personalize their experience and increase your website or app’s appeal to advertisers. Plus, you can assess what people post about to determine the types of content that will resonate the most with your online community.

Keep in mind that digital conversation tools also connect people together, forming long-lasting relationships that are tied to your brand.

But you can’t assume that people will become active, model community members unless they understand what kind of discussions and behaviors are expected of them.

Media organizations that take the time to outline and promote what positive behavior looks like for their communities will be well-positioned to grow attention levels, memberships and various revenue streams.

“The most thriving and profitable online communities are often the ones where positive behavior is encouraged, demonstrated and rewarded by the community host,” Adams explains. “No matter how intuitive and engaging your moderation tools are, you need to develop a battle plan if you want to activate your community effectively.”

Ultimately, media organizations can take a few simple steps to ensure their communities are overflowing with activity:

Pose Questions for Users To Answer

If you want to increase activity from your digital community, you can spark discussions and debates by showcasing thought-provoking questions.

“One of the best ways to keep discussions in your commenting section buzzing and on-topic is to give your readers a prompt through a question that relates to your content,” Adams states. “Not everyone will understand how you want them to behave if you don’t give them some level of guidance to follow.”

Consider highlighting questions for community members at the bottom of your content piece. Or, you can pin them as posts within your commenting widget.

Interacting with your community members, even by just getting a conversation started, will give users the direction they need to post comments that are on-topic and positive.

Reward and Highlight Model Behavior

Your community members play a significant role in the success of your business. So how are you taking the time to reward your most active users?

“By rewarding commenters for positive and productive contributions, you’re incentivizing your most loyal supporters to continue participating in your digital community,” says Adams.

There are several ways you can show readers that you appreciate good behavior.

You can give top contributors badges based on their participation levels, pin their comments to the top of your commenting widget, invite them to help you moderate live events and send them an email to thank them.

Set Up Clear, Accessible Community Guidelines

Your community guidelines essentially act as a blueprint for acceptable and positive behavior on your website or app.

According to Adams, you should be direct in your community guidelines — tell your audience exactly what’s expected of their behavior on your digital properties. That includes outlining what kind of behavior isn’t appropriate.

Adams suggests “your guidelines should make it clear that comments that appear legally objectionable or [encourage/condone] a criminal offense or any form of violence or harassment, will NOT be tolerated.”

Crafting clear community guidelines posted in an easy-to-access spot on your digital property will pave the way for acceptable behavior and positive conversations.

Media organizations must implement strategies to outline, reward, highlight and facilitate positive behavior in their online communities. By doing so, companies can benefit from a closely connected, active and growing audience that can be monetized continuously.

For more information on how to build positive behavior in your community, view a list of community-building best practices here.

5 Benefits Publishers Stand To Gain With A First-Party Data Strategy

This cannot be overstated: the shift from a third-party to a first-party ecosystem will be challenging but it also presents the first opportunity in 20 years for publishers to reclaim their power among ad tech and social media giants. Media companies that move into 2022 focused almost entirely on producing superior content will attract genuinely engaged users, and win.

Download the Publisher's Guide to First-Party Data

And, how refreshing! Death of the third-party cookie is giving publishers the freedom to shift their attention towards a first-party ecosystem rooted in audience engagement for the first time since digital marketing and programmatic media forced their hand.

The “clickbait” era pushed publishers and media companies to diverge from content-first strategies with misaligned incentives that benefitted nobody in the ecosystem. Publishers have focused on quantity over quality at the expense of user experience and the perceived value of their content. The quality of audiences reached by advertisers plummeted, and users lost trust in media titles they used to have delivered to their doorstep. Publishers have been stuck in a negative feedback loop since 1996 and have a chance to rethink everything in 2022.

The shift to an advertising paradigm based on real identity, not cobbled-together proxies from a bunch of third-party cookies, is the future of advertising and a real opportunity for publishers. Audience engagement is a critical driver of conversion and first-party user data, and the lowest-hanging fruit for media organizations to implement in preparation for 2022. Automated technology makes audience engagement significantly more cost-effective and viable for publishers to collect first-party data than it ever was in an analog world.

Here are five profits that publishers stand to gain with a first-party strategy:

The Power To Collect Fully Consented Data

First-party data is fully consented data. It’s authenticated by users who create “logged in” profiles so they can comment on articles or register their user preferences to receive more personalized notifications from a publisher. In a first-party system, publishers are transparent with how and why they are collecting first-party data, and users opt-in with full consent. Fully consented data is high-quality data, a huge improvement for publishers seeking incremental revenue from ad placement.

The Opportunity To Build A "Known" Audience

Converting users from “unknown” to “known” will be a crucial focus for publishers seeking to bridge their first-party data with the advertising ecosystem. When users feel motivated to opt-in by an attractive value exchange and become “known” to a publisher, they willfully supply first-party data that publishers can use to identify their audience segments and serve personalized ads, and experiences.

The Ability To Drive Community Engagement

Two benefits of building an active community are subscribers and ad revenue. Publishers that implement community engagement tools will dig deep into their core audience’s behaviour and interest through user engagement, behaviour, and preference data. Publishers can then plug that raw data into their paywall, business intelligence, CRM and data management platforms.

The Benefits Of Better Content Performance

First-party offers publishers a considerable opportunity to grow their content performance with personalized recommendations (push notifications) informed by data collected from logged-in users. Personalization gives users what they want (and ask for) and leads to higher engagement while respecting opt-outs. Investing in personalization tools will pay off with serious rewards.

First-Party Data Ownership

First-party data ownership will save many publishers’ faltering ad businesses by giving them exclusive possession of their audience information. Ownership will become increasingly important when publishers pitch advertisers their first-party data sets and soon become the pillar of programmatic advertising sales. The sooner that publishers begin developing their first-party data sets, the better (and more significant) their programmatic ad sales outcomes will be.

The Bottom Line:

When one door closes, another one opens. Death of the third party cookie is giving publishers the freedom to shift their attention away from the third-party programmatic ad model towards a first-party ecosystem rooted in audience engagement for the first time in over 20 years. The media business is returning to a golden era of great content and growing audiences.

How To Leverage First-Party Data To Activate Your Audience

The days of social media companies profiting from publishers’ communities are over — and that’s a beautiful thing. Leaving behind the necessity to chase volume for ad impressions is pushing the publishing industry in a positive direction and presenting media companies with the chance to reclaim their positions of power for the first time in 20 years. Publishers now have the freedom to focus on producing great content and engaging audiences without being at the mercy of an algorithm or cookie.

The move towards a first-party data and revenue model relies on highly valuable content and incredible user experiences. Building a proprietary and high-resolution first-party audience that will attract advertisers and marketers, based on contextual and behavioural signals, is how publishers will reclaim their audience and generate new revenue opportunities in a post-cookie world. One of the best things that publishers can do today in preparation is to focus on increasing the volume, accuracy and recency of their first-party data gathering activities.

Let’s break down the values of data volume, accuracy and recency:

The value and volume of first-party data is clear; the more data that a publisher has to make available to buyers, the better. The value of data accuracy is also immense; it’s collected when users declare their interests, either directly or by their actions, and stored on the server-side regardless of how browsers or regulators evolve their privacy restrictions in the future. Finally, user data has a very short half-life, so media companies with audiences that return frequently will have an advantage with data recency — bringing users back to your website frequently will help to ensure that your audience data is fresh.

Now, let’s review some of the ways that publishers are collecting first-party data today:

Newsletters

Newsletters have emerged as one of the most popular tactics for collecting first-party data. It’s a great strategy because newsletters capture registrations in a user-friendly way and provide a clear value exchange for readers. They also cement a direct relationship between the publisher and the user.

Registration Walls

Registration walls are becoming increasingly popular both as standalone tools and as a step along the paywall meter. Registration walls can be very effective in collecting first-party data but they can also undercut the relationship-building process with your audience and put a damper on data collection so they should be implemented carefully. As the value of first-party data increases, publishers may want to consider rebalancing their registration walls to ensure they’re maximizing the perceived value exchange for users.

Community Engagement and User-Generated Content

Community engagement and user-generated content (UGC) represent the most comprehensive and sustainable ways for publishers to build their first-party data stores. While some publishers previously shied away from community engagement and UGC in fear of the costs traditionally associated with managing online communities, modern automated moderation technology is making this process highly cost-effective — creating new and scalable opportunities for publishers to promote community engagement and generate valuable first-party data.

We mentioned earlier that authenticated users allow publishers to store and track their activity on the server-side regardless of how browsers or regulators evolve their privacy restrictions in the future. Viafoura data shows that even the simplest implementations of audience engagement tools drive between 30 to 50 percent of all user registrations on our customer sites.

Here’s some compelling data from Viafoura on how user engagement tools drive user engagement and retention:

Engaged users spend three times as much time onsite than non-engaged users.
Engaged users have a fifty percent retention rate in month two, versus three percent for non-engaged users, and even after six months, engaged user retention rates only dip to forty percent.
Registered users generate twenty times more page views and monthly time spent on site than non-registered users. User retention and frequency is crucial, and engaged and authenticated users are much more likely to return.

Here’s the clincher:

To leverage first-party data to activate their audience, publishers must offer value in exchange for the effort it takes for a user to register, and for their consent to collect. At Viafoura, we call these “value exchange moments” and we design our products to easily integrate these moments into your site. The landscape has changed. Building a value-driven relationship with your audience by creating a series of engagement opportunities is how you will reclaim your audience and revenue opportunities in a post-cookies world.

To learn more about how to build your first-party data strategy download The Publisher’s Guide to First-Party Data today.