Tag: digital audience

Why taking control of your community on your own platform is a much better alternative to social media

Imagine you’re the owner of a local store. I stroll in one day and tell you to let a group of nameless, faceless people somewhere far away decide how you can market to your clientele and how you can interact with them. They get to decide what the rules are and they can change them whenever they feel like. 

You’d probably take a polite pass on that deal. 

Yet that’s a little bit like what millions of online brands do when they hand over the keys to their community of followers to social media. The reality is that those platforms exert much more influence over communities than one might think. When brands don’t actually own all the access to their community on their own terms, it can hamper their business and their ability to grow. 

There’s only one real solution to this conundrum, and it involves you taking control. 

What’s wrong with having a community on Facebook?

Letting social media call the shots on engagement around your content can be risky for several reasons, says Mark Zohar, president and COO at Viafoura. 

For example, the moderation that happens on Facebook or Twitter is subject to the policies that they create and enforce. But those policies may not be the community guidelines you would support on your owned and operated properties.

If you only engage your audience on social media, you don’t actually own that customer relationship. You also don’t own the data insights and you’re vulnerable to a change in algorithm or a change in a platform’s community policies. 

“And all of a sudden it’s, ‘holy cow, my community disappeared and I can’t control that,’” says Zohar. “We’re not saying social media is going away, but a lot of brands need to start thinking about how they can reclaim their audience.”

How do I take control of my own platform?

When users come to your website, you need to provide an exciting or interesting reason for them to stay. If they can’t engage or participate, they’re probably going to leave and return to social media. 

Simply put, your audience wants to be able to engage in a community, something Zohar calls “the heart of every single product.” Providing a space for that community to thrive will help, but it has to be captivating.

“Brands need to learn from social media to create social experiences,” says Zohar. “They need to really understand that their audiences are inherently social and not to just say ‘okay, go do that somewhere else and come back for a passive consumption experience.’”

Tech platforms like Facebook are experts at providing “value-exchange moments,” or instances in which a user feels willing to reveal personal information, usually in the form of registration, in return for an incentive. But that’s just the beginning.

Create contact and connections

Zohar suggests several ways you can connect with your audience on your own platform once they’ve logged in. 

One of them is to build a community feed where users can like, comment and interact with people they follow. Viafoura gathered data from various clients and found that with user generated content, you’re going to get 10% creators and 90% consumers, but a significant portion of your overall users, about 20-25%, spend a huge amount of time engaging with and consuming content. They need a space to do that and you can provide that space. 

“Publishers can inject their own content and other interesting content in the feed so it becomes this great place where users spend a lot of time engaging with content and interacting related to their community interests,” said Zohar.

With tools crafted by Viafoura, publishing brands can allow their users to comment, like and generate discussion. They can even engage directly with brands who can participate in the conversation through things like live Q&As or AMAs, where reporters or experts can take questions from readers and answer in real time.

The payback? Community loyalty

All of these engagement and user retention capabilities add up to loyalty over the long run. 

Viafoura’s research shows that these users “pay you back” through time spent on your site, generating more page views, increasing propensity to subscribe to premium products and ideally, spending money on your site. With the right solutions, they also give you the data insights into their preferences, interests and sentiments that you can use to tailor content offers and advertising strategies. 

“All that happens only if you have access to those users on your own site where you can do all that,” added Zohar.

Why turning off the comments is a threat, not a solution, for media companies

Trolls, spam and misinformation have given commenting spaces a bad reputation.

Websites that are flooded with offensive and untrustworthy comments can lose the respect of advertisers and users. Publishers often think that the only solution is to give up and close down their commenting tools.

But shutting off the comments isn’t a solution; it’s a catalyst for serious business problems.

The issue with dropping commenting from your website

The reality is that media companies suffer the second they get rid of their website’s social tools.

“(Without comments, companies) lose a direct connection with their audience (and just provide) passive content for readers, as opposed to creating active opportunities for feedback and opinions,” says Mark Zohar, Viafoura’s president and COO. “That feedback loop between content, publisher and author is critical for high-performing content and re-engaging audiences.”

In a nutshell, media organizations need commenting tools to get closer to their communities and create better experiences for audience members and staff.

Companies that drop their comments aren’t solving anything; they’re just allowing their worst audience members to damage their brands. 

Throw in the fact that 50% of new user registrations happen on web pages with commenting tools, and it’s easy to see why social spaces are must-have website features for all publishers hoping to grow closer to their audiences.

Cupped human hands on a table with speech bubbles in the middle.

How to run safe and successful commenting spaces

Comment moderation is a publisher’s greatest weapon against offensive user behaviour. The importance of supporting any online social tools with advanced comment moderation services cannot be overstated — it’s what separates the safe, lucrative social spaces from those that are doomed to fail.

Media companies that pair their online commenting spaces with effective moderation give themselves the greatest chance to grow their audiences, customer loyalty and revenue without damaging their reputations.  

“People want to participate in communities where they feel safe,” Zohar explains. “We know from our data that communities and sites with active, positive moderation that’s civil generate engagement on-site.” 

When protected by Viafoura’s automated moderation services, our data shows that customers have seen engaged users spend 168 times more time on-site, gain up to 2,000 new monthly registrations, and view 3.6 times more pages than media companies without commenting tools. 

“Where (commenting) doesn’t happen, we see a drop-off in engagement,” adds Zohar.

Instead of ditching comments, media companies can draw on moderation to create safe environments that invite journalists, readers and commenters to communicate and connect with each other. 

Nervous that moderation might be too expensive to invest in? 

There are plenty of cost-effective AI-based and human moderation options available. You can also look for an engagement tool provider that includes moderation services directly in their commenting solution for an affordable, hassle-free experience.

Get rewarded with user data

Newsrooms don’t get much value from sending content into a void, where they never hear about it again. Moderated commenting tools give journalists the chance to have positive conversations about their content, get feedback about it from their registered readers, and use that information to make content even more compelling in the future. 

This means that as registered users leave comments on your site, you can expand your user data beyond their general profiles to include information on audience behaviours, interests, sentiments, propensity and purchase intent. 

Once you have that declarative data, you can feed it into your business model. 

“Allowing for users to communicate directly with you and (other readers) around content creates insights, (leading) to rich user profiles that evolve over time as they participate actively in the community,” says Zohar. “By understanding user behaviour on-site as well as user interest and propensity… publishers can improve things like newsletter curation, sign-ups and target users for subscriptions.”

The more first-party data you can get from commenters, the better you can group like-minded users together to personalize their experiences, send them subscription messages and show them relevant ads.  

In other words, your commenting solution has the potential to give you an edge over your competitors. So whatever you do, don’t turn off the comments!

Want to know more about our commenting and engagement solutions? Click here to check out our product suite.

How to build a following around your journalists, your coverage, and your brand

Building a loyal following isn’t a short-term effort. It’s a long-term process that requires you to break down rich first-party data to identify the type of content that engages your audience. Without first-party data, it’s very difficult to know what type of audience a journalist is building. 

Implementing a community engagement platform to collect first-party data from registered users is essential for finding out what types of content your users like, planning future content, and developing a strategy to create a following around your journalists and your content. 

Below, we’re going to look at some tried and tested ways media organizations can build a following around their journalists, their coverage, and their brand, from driving registrations to personalizing newsfeeds and producing live Q&As.

Drive registrations to capture first-party data

Getting visitors to register to your site is the first step toward building a loyal following because it enables you to start collecting first-party data to analyze users’ preferences, so you can create and recommend content that’s relevant to their interests. 

When building a following, the easiest way to encourage your audience to register on your site is to provide them with a gated comment section where they can enter their name and email address to leave their opinions on articles and interact with other users. 

It’s worth noting that once a reader subscribes to your site and participates in the comment section, your journalists can start to monitor their feedback to identify what topics they’re interested in, so they can create more engaging content and start to build a bigger following.

Provide users with personalized newsfeeds

Today, consumers expect personalized digital experiences whether they’re shopping online or searching for news. As a result, it’s becoming more important for media organizations to provide their audience with personalized newsfeeds so that they spend more time on-site engaging with relevant content. 

The best way to personalize newsfeeds is with an AI-driven community engagement platform that lets you see what types of articles users spend the most time on and their sentiments toward particular topics and journalists, so you can recommend the types of stories they’re most likely to be interested in.

For instance, if someone reacts to an article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by clicking the “like” button, the AI can infer that the user is interested in left-leaning news coverage and recommend other political topics and authors that a democratic supporter might also be interested in reading or following.

Gain loyal followers by offering live Q&As, AMAs, and interactions with guarded journalists and speakers

If you want to increase your loyal followers, live content like Q&As and Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions can be a powerful tool to build a closer relationship between your journalists and your audience. 

Live content like Q&As and AMAs gives your audience an opportunity to interact with journalists they wouldn’t be able to reach normally. 

Direct interaction between your journalists and users makes the audience feel like you value their opinions, while also giving them a chance to ask questions, fact-check live content and recommend future topics they’d like to see covered.

Keeping the conversation civil with automated moderation

When building a user community, you need to have a strategy to address toxicity if you want to retain your audience long term. If you don’t have a solution in place to moderate comments and remove hate speech or abuse, then the conversation can quickly spiral out of control and push people away.  

For example, on Twitter, toxic messages accounted for 21% of all conversations around the Covid-19 pandemic. The high level of toxicity across social media is a key reason why as little as 18% of Americans believe social media companies are doing an excellent or good job at addressing online harassment. 

Automatically moderating comments with an AI-based solution is critical for making sure that abusive content is removed from the conversation, while also ensuring that your audience has a safe space to communicate with each other and with your journalists to form a greater connection.

Give your audience the content they want

Getting to know your audience in real-time with first-party data is the key to building a loyal following around your journalists and your brand. The better you get to know your users through their data, the better you can develop the content they want to see.

How to grow your audience: 5 ways to stimulate subscriptions and registrations

While it’s easy to gauge the growth of your audience, it can be difficult to develop a clear portrait of who they are unless you have the right tools. Building a user community on your site with a community engagement tool is critical for getting to know your audience and what makes them tick.

With more users discussing news and content on and off social media, audience development on your site is now critical for attracting a wider range of readers, accelerating your engaged user strategy, and increasing subscriptions. 

Taking simple steps like creating a comments section, using registration as a gateway to participate in the comments, and providing interactive content like live blogs or AMAs can be the push your audience needs to subscribe to your site. These should be a key part of an audience growth strategy for publishers and digital media organizations alike.

So let’s look at five simple ways building a user community can help accelerate your subscription and registration strategy. 

Offer users a two-way dialogue

The days of readers passively consuming news are long gone. Today’s users not only want to read the author’s opinions, but they also want to contribute to the conversation in real-time. 

You can grow your audience by implementing a comments section that provides them with a space to engage in a two-way dialogue with journalists and other readers, so they can share their perspectives on current events. 

This enhanced dialogue can actively attract new users and drive subscriptions among those who want to leave their thoughts or opinions on content. In fact, research shows that 60.9% of commenters or comment readers would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in news comment sections. 

Gate your user community and comments

A discussion space can be used to further your audience development strategy. Once you’ve set up a comments section that allows users in the community to have a live two-way dialogue, you can gate it to incentivize people to sign up so they can participate in the conversation.

Gating the comments section can help boost subscriptions and registrations by encouraging your audience to create an account so they can leave feedback on published content.

The signup process should be effortless, with users able to quickly enter their name and email address so they can start engaging with your community about the topics that are related to their interests.

Building a relationship between commenters and journalists

When building an audience, the relationship between the reporter and reader is often overlooked. Building a user community with an active comments section not only provides users with a place to communicate, it also gives journalists and writers a resource they can use to build a closer relationship with their readers, and better understand them. 

Journalists can use community feedback to learn what their readers’ interests are, what content readers prefer, and then use that information to inform their future content strategy. 

For example, if a journalist produces an article on the Olympics Games, the audience can ask questions about related subtopics and sporting events that might make good subjects for future articles.  

As journalists engage with the community to better understand their interests, they can enhance their coverage so that their content becomes more pertinent to readers and more compelling for both subscribed and unsubscribed users. And compelling content leads to higher reader interest and drives audience growth.

Using first-party data to provide more relevant content

Building a user community on your site also provides you with direct access to valuable first-party data that you can use to analyze your audience’s profiles and break down the topics they’re most interested in. Like the comments, this also provides you with valuable insights you can use to produce more relevant content. Leveraging this information should be a priority to build and retain your audience.

For instance, if a user is interested in sports like football or boxing, you can use an AI-driven community engagement solution to recommend articles written by experts on these topics to encourage them to spend more time consuming content on your site. 

Using a community engagement solution to offer registered users personalized feeds and content recommendations is the perfect way to entice them to subscribe, so they automatically keep up-to-date with the content they find most compelling.

Live Q&As

Having an active user community provides you with a resource you can use to participate in engaging real-time content like live Q&As, where a journalist or expert in a particular field can host live Q&A sessions with the community, allowing users to ask questions and actively influence the conversation taking place.

One example of this approach is highlighted by The Independent, who recently started running live Q&As and Ask Me Anything sessions (AMAs) to give users an opportunity to ask questions to experts, journalists, and public figures. In one Q&A with a travel correspondent, users could ask questions about Omicron travel restrictions.

It’s also important to note that live Q&As also function as a connection-builder, giving your audience a chance to have a deeper connection with experts and journalists who tend to be guarded from the audience. This opportunity to connect can help you grow your audience naturally while encouraging many users to subscribe.

Building an active user community pays dividends

Giving your audience a place to come together to share their thoughts pays dividends, not just because it helps attract users to register to your site, but also because it helps you create more high-quality audience segments, which you can share with advertisers to encourage them to place ads on your site.

What the true lifetime value of your digital audience looks like

Every audience member is a valuable potential source of revenue for your media organization. However, some users offer more value than others throughout their lifetime as readers. 

So which visitors should you invest the most time and energy into nurturing across your digital properties?

Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s VP of product management, says the value of a user is ultimately down to the dollars you earn from them, but he adds that user value can also be measured through the data and user-generated content (UGC) you can extract from them. 

“Someone who shares a lot of content might also be more valuable than someone who doesn’t because they’re essentially contributing free content into the digital experience for other users,” Seaman says.

So what does that mean for your organization?

The engagement gap between anonymous and registered users

While almost all audience members start as anonymous visitors, the faster you can convert them to registered users, the better.

In fact, Viafoura’s data team reveals that registered users are significantly more engaged than anonymous visitors, resulting in:

  • 11 times more page views
  • 3.7 times more days spent active on publisher properties
  • 18.5 times more time spent on-site

All that additional engagement is key for publishers to collect critical data and insights to better understand and serve their audience. 

“Being able to use that knowledge of your users to improve your content coverage and also inform the experience provides unique value-add,” Seaman explains. “By getting users to register, you’re also forming a direct relationship, meaning you can communicate with them, personalize their experiences based on their profiles and gather behavioural data around the content they engage with.”

This means that your registered users — who offer superior data collection opportunities around their interactions — can inform your content and business strategies.  

Meanwhile, anonymous users can only be monitored with third-party cookies, which are no longer reliable forms of tracking since they’re coming to an end.

digital customer experience

The impact of audience engagement on your revenue streams

There’s a direct connection between your most engaged users and your ability to grow your advertising and subscription revenue. Your registered users are known and are more engaged than your anonymous, passive visitors. So they offer greater revenue-earning potential than your unknown readers. 

“The more engaged a user is, the more time they spend on-site, the more frequently they return, the more likely they are to subscribe, the more ad views they’ll generate,” Seaman says. “And the more you know about your audience as they interact with your site, the more you can target your ad campaigns.”

Advertisers will pay for premiums to target specific audience groups. Viafoura data highlights that each registered user can generate an average of 13.7 times more ad revenue than an anonymous user when publishers have three ads on a page. 

To maximize the lifetime value of a user from both reader and ad revenue perspectives, publishers need engagement tools to persuade their audience to register or subscribe.

Extending user value without cutting off engagement

Though many companies use registration walls and paywalls to persuade users to convert, interact and pay, these tactics can also cut off user engagement if they’re not deployed effectively.

“Superior registration walls just block or blur out the content, leaving the rest of the site functions and allowing users to continue to read comments,” Seaman reveals. “And if you’re going to ask people to pay, you have to make sure you’re listening to what they want and are providing them with a value in the form of community.” 

You can’t lock all content and on-site features behind a registration or paywall and expect people to want to convert. Instead, you have to build their engagement levels first by allowing them to access on-site engagement features, even if the content itself is locked. 

Humans naturally want to form social connections. So if you give your users the tools they need to explore your brand’s community, they’ll gradually want to register to join conversations. 

Once they register, you can form in-depth profiles of your known users and guide them to a paywall when they’re highly engaged and connected to the digital community. 

Users are seeking the opportunity to join communities of like-minded individuals around specific topics of interest. The more you can guide them toward an engaged, socially connected state, the harder it will be for them to lose interest in your brand. 

For example, data from the Pew Research Center reveals that 81% of teenagers feel highly connected to their communities of friends on social media and 2/3 of teens feel that they can depend on social media for social support.

For these users, quitting social media comes with a price: sacrificing social support and meaningful connections. So providing your users with opportunities to socialize with others is a simple way to encourage them to become loyal to your brand’s community and content.

“The era of going to a site and having a lonely experience will be increasingly odd,” says Seaman. “From a loyalty perspective, it’s easier for you to walk away from a brand than to walk away from an actual community.”

The Only Guide To Comment Moderation You Will Ever Need

A quick search of the Internet will show you a plethora of guides on using comment moderation features provided by popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. It comes as no surprise; the liberty of free speech is abused quite often on the web, where trolls and toxic individuals can hide behind the relative anonymity of their usernames. And at the scale on which some platforms operate, it’s impossible to have enough mods to catch and handle every single offensive comment or inappropriate post that gets left on their pages.  

Comment moderation tools offer a relatively hassle-free way to keep your brand’s web platform a safe and inclusive space for everyone. Viafoura includes comment moderation functionality within our software suite, and we’re a big fan of using them to supplement your efforts to regulate and moderate the type of conversations and content that gets shared on your platform.

But successfully performing comment moderation takes more than just leaving it to the algorithm; any digital media brand that’s looking to develop the right kind of community around their content needs to understand the principles behind the act. This post aims to cover the essentials of comment moderation and how you can use them as the basis for your own approach to comment moderation on your website.

The importance of comment moderation

Comment moderation requires so much time and attention because failing to have proper measures in place can expose your community to profanity, abuse, spam, and other unsavoury elements. Not only does this harm your overall image as a brand, but it also discourages prospective audience members and first-time visitors from coming back. Every brand’s responsibility is to ensure that their community is healthy and free from this kind of toxicity, and comment moderation is just one of the methods that make it possible.

But note that the aim of comment moderation isn’t to suppress individual opinions or views that are critical or against your brand’s interests. There’s a fine line between moderation and censorship. Doing it for the right reasons is essential to ensuring your digital media brand nurtures a positive relationship with its audience. Focus on creating an environment that facilitates healthy discussion and respectful exchanges.

comment moderation importance

Tips towards impactful comment moderation

We mentioned earlier that if you’re looking to implement comment moderation on your platform, it isn’t enough to just rely on comment moderation tools. You need to form a cohesive strategy and comment moderation policy that aligns with your brand’s values. Here are some steps that you can take to get some ideas on a practical approach to comment moderation.

Plan for uncivil content with your comment moderation policy

Get your team together to predict possible responses to your content that might seem likely based on prevalent ideas and ongoing discussion about your topic. For example, if you cover a story on a political topic, expect supporters of the opposition to push their own beliefs and agenda. If your moderation team knows what to expect, they’re better prepared to handle the possible situations that may arise.

Comment moderation on Facebook as well as Instagram comment moderation are both meant to align with their terms of service, showing audience members that they’re consistent with their values. This can be a good starting place when looking to flesh out your comment moderation policy, since shaping your t comment moderation policy around your community guidelines also makes it easier for their audience to understand why your moderators take action against certain types of post and content.

Ensure your team knows your policy

Everyone on a ship needs to know how to sail, and everyone on your team involved in moderation and platform usage needs to know your comment moderation policy like the back of their hand.

Consider preparing a document with keywords or names that may indicate problematic topics that require extra attention. Take the time to go over the specifics, reasons, and practices of your comment moderation policy with anyone involved in the process, especially your moderators.

This will ensure that their actions and judgement remain consistent with your approach and the policy that you’ve put forward for your audience.

Enforce the comment moderation policy when necessary

Once you have the guidelines for comment moderation in place, you’ll need to prepare to enforce them. It’s not enough to put up the rules and expect that everyone will follow them; you’ll need to actively remove posts or edit them to align with your policies.

Remember that comment moderation should only be performed to steer the discussion towards safer spaces and remove outright harmful or toxic content that doesn’t serve much purpose. But you also shouldn’t be afraid to ban users outright when necessary; it’ll be much more beneficial for your customer acquisition and retention in the long run.

Still, depending on the scale of your platform, this can require a lot of manpower, which can be expensive and is based on the assumption that you can afford to hire the number of moderators needed.

comment moderation enforcement

Communicate and take breaks when necessary

Using communication software like Slack or Google Hangouts is a great way to keep your moderation team in touch and create a space where they can get support and depend on each other during busy times.

Your moderators can get clarification on topics they’re unsure about, and they can also feel more comfortable taking breaks knowing that the rest of the team can handle things in their absence.

These aspects of comment moderation are very important to keeping your team feeling empowered and supported, and it can help them work much more effectively to keep your comments free of any problems.

Conclusion

Comment moderation is an essential part of managing relations with your existing audience. It allows digital media brands to exert control over the type of content and discussion on their platform. But while comment moderation can easily be left to an automated system, it takes a structured, intentional approach to ensure that it functions successfully. Viafoura’s suite of tools is designed to promote community engagement and comes with comment moderation features that can easily be integrated and customized to suit your platform’s needs. Get in touch with us to schedule a demo and see how we can help you build a safe space for your community today!

How to Properly Target, Develop and Maintain Your Digital Audience

The concept of a digital audience and digital audience management has only really come about in the past decade or so in the marketing field. This fact speaks volumes about how different the general views on web-based branding and engagement were back then. But it’s pretty clear that nowadays, the widespread success of digital audience targeting is plenty of reason to use it as a standard for all digital media brands.

But while it’s easy to understand that engaging with a digital audience is the smart thing to do, it’s not nearly as easy to know how to go about it. Today, stats and metrics dominate how we typically measure success, and it’s easy for digital media brands to forget that clicks and views aren’t as crucial to the big picture as digital audience retention. 

Thankfully, Viafoura takes a structured approach to digital audience targeting and development, one that we’re happy to share here for any readers interested in learning how to go about it the right way. 

What exactly is digital audience development?

For those who are a bit behind on things or are just looking to understand why it pays to maintain a digital audience, it’s best to start from the beginning – specifically, the objectives of maintaining a digital audience.

Establishing relationships

We’re long past the times where all organizations and brands were simply expected to deliver a product or service, with everything else being at their discretion. Customers today aren’t enticed by just getting a good price or exactly what they asked for. Instead, digital media brands should build relationships with their digital audience to create connections and have them value your efforts.

digital audience relationships

Getting more customers

Of course, this is still a big part of marketing and brand development; but the idea is that it isn’t the bottom line. Expanding your digital audience is something that will naturally happen over time as you build connections with your customers and engage with them beyond a source of information or a service provider; effectively, you’re taking out two birds with one stone. Be it through referrals, added value in your content, or using digital audience targeting to appeal to new, unexplored demographics, new customers can discover your brand and convert to paying members of your online community.

Building customer loyalty

It’s not enough to simply secure a customer for the moment. Continued success is built on digital media brands’ efforts to engage with their audience and encourage them to return for more. It’s essential to keep finding ways to turn first-time arrivals into repeat visitors since this forms the backbone of your community. More often than not, satisfied customers will bring their friends and family to you, which makes it even more important to secure the loyalty of your audience.

The difference between digital audience development and marketing

The first step to understanding the right approach to digital audience development is understanding its differences from marketing. Granted, there are some definite similarities between the two concepts, but some significant differences also need to be noted.

Marketing focuses on showcasing the full value proposition of your product or service. Print ads, commercials, billboards, and more connect customers with a specific need with a product that satisfies it. But developing an audience is more humanistic; it goes over what your audience likes about your service, what they want to see more of, how they use your services, and so on. Digital audience development actually shares a lot of its sensibilities with customer retention, which also employs marketing tactics to pull in and retain an audience.

So does this mean that you should prioritize one over the other? Not exactly. Digital audience development and marketing naturally promote each other; digital audience measurement and development often use marketing strategies, and digital marketing is often vital to building brand loyalty. Both are important to a brand’s overall success and should be equally utilized as a part of a digital media brand’s overall strategy.

It is worth considering that marketing tends to be more expensive compared to digital audience development. Since marketing works on creating ads and paying for advertising space, these costs are similar to traditional methods and can add up to a significant amount. On the other hand, digital audience measurement and development costs are much more frugal, often offering venues that are free to implement within your plan. And since digital audience development focuses on customer relations and your audience bringing in more first-time visitors in touch with your brand, your returns on investment are much more long-term. Viafoura’s tools are designed to do precisely that; provide long-term value and form a community that propagates itself after enough time and investment.

Most digital media brands have already implemented a combination of these strategies within their environments, but hopefully, these financial benefits convince those still wary of the returns on digital marketing development more of a reason to divert more resources towards it.

The key factors in digital audience development

Digital audience development has no formula, but it is based upon some concepts that can be considered key principles in developing your digital audience. They’re well known as the 4 C’s of successful audience development, and they apply at a digital level just as well. Take these factors into account when developing your strategy, and you’ll see significant success in bringing in members to form a community around your digital media brand.

Collaboration

Audiences respond positively to a brand’s efforts to interact and partner with organizations or causes they support. Because of this, collaboration is a crucial aspect of digital audience development that all digital media brands should be open to implementing. Collaboration offers opportunities for new members to find your brand and expands your audience over time. Collaboration doesn’t need to be at an organizational level either; interacting with your audience and sharing and highlighting their stories and experiences are also ways to collaborate with your readers to promote your brand.

Connection

Retaining an audience boils down to how much of a connection they have to your brand. If your audience agrees with your practices, supports the opinions you promote and sympathizes with the content you present, you’re building strong connections that last well past their initial visit to your platform. But this also means you’re expected to keep an ear to the ground and pay attention to what your audience thinks about your brand. Ignoring their opinions and value as individuals is a quick way to lose their interest and loyalty.

Caring

Newer generations of consumers are increasingly distrustful of advertisements and marketing strategies. As a result, the best approach to convincing them to give your digital media brand a shot is candid honesty. Make your communications, policies, and decisions transparent, and convey as clearly as possible what your intentions are. Promoting healthy discussion, entertaining critique, and taking your audience’s opinions into account is key here. This promotes trust, and digital audience development is much more successful when your audience members trust their brands.

Community

This is our personal favourite C, not just because we promote online community development and management through our software suite. Following the previous 3 C’s will naturally allow your audience to come together around a digital media brand. When this happens, it’s up to the brand to provide the space and tools needed for healthy discourse to occur. And it doesn’t need to stop there! As the brand, your opinions and actions carry enormous sway within your audience. Therefore, a key aspect of digital audience development is taking part in the conversation. If you mingle with your audience, it humanizes your brand and reinforces their connection towards you and your content.

digital audience

Takeaway

Digital audience development has always held the same concepts at its core – it’s just the times and the methodology that have changed over the years. Digital media brands are expected to remember their audience’s human aspect and look past the numbers when looking to promote goodwill and loyalty towards their content and image. By following the steps within this article, any brand can achieve huge success in bringing in and retaining an audience. 

Viafoura strives to assist digital media brands with developing and maintaining a robust digital audience. Our suite of software tools is specifically designed to promote and retain audience viewership and attention through providing tools for community development. To learn more about what we do, contact us to schedule a demo and start building your online community today.

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