digital experience platform Archives | Page 3 of 3

Why your community’s dialogue is the best resource for building a successful content strategy

Humans are innately social. Why else would Facebook have 2.89 billion active users each month?

But these experiences shouldn’t be limited to social media platforms. In fact, failing to support news content with social and interactive experiences is a wasted opportunity for media organizations.

Because social media sites are rife with misinformation, data privacy issues and trolls, users have come to trust news sites 25% more than social media platforms, according to a Reuters report.

Experts in the media industry are now noticing that users are losing interest in sharing content and engaging with their connections on social media.

“Instead, people want to actively seek out opportunities to join communities and conversations that are more isolated or centred around topics of interest,” says Dan Seaman, VP of product management at Viafoura.”

A two-way conversation between editorial and audiences

Without a two-way dialogue between audience members and editorial staff, media companies are unable to fully understand or connect with the community around their content.

“Your audience expects to have the opportunity to like, comment, leave their opinions and submit questions,” states Mark Zohar, president and COO at Viafoura. “By giving them that opportunity, media companies can create a healthy level of engagement, gather data insights and build a direct relationship between content, authors and readers.”

Media organizations that allow their audience members to ask questions and share their thoughts have access to a goldmine of information about their community. And that information can be used to make their overall content strategies more relevant and aligned with reader interests.

Offering a two-way dialogue also forges lasting, meaningful relationships with audiences that encourage them to return more frequently to consume and interact with content.

“We know that when authors leave comments in the conversation experience, that absolutely does drive engagement because people want to respond to credible authors and sources,” Zohar adds.

So establishing strong social connections that lead to audience loyalty isn’t just about allowing readers to chat with one another. Journalists can also contribute to community conversations for deeper insight into reader preferences, thoughts and opinions.

Sourcing insights and follow-ups from your audience

Zohar outlines that media organizations can use their audience’s comments to find potential sources for future news stories.

“You can look through the community to see if anyone’s written about a specific experience they might have had in a comment,” Zohar explains. “In this sense, community members can become anonymous sources for content, including investigative stories.”

Journalists can include questions as conversation prompts at the end of their articles or within the comment section to encourage people to share their personal experiences and opinions.

Occasionally, users may also post their burning questions and concerns around specific content topics, which could help inspire journalists to form new ideas for follow-up stories.

As journalists begin to pay more attention to the words of their audience members, users will see their thoughts and preferences reflected in the content, leading to a more captivating on-site experience.

Viafoura data even highlights users’ time spent on-site can increase by 16 times when media organizations simply support their content with social tools.

Establishing healthy conversation guidelines

Despite the need to cultivate conversations with their audiences, media organizations also face the challenge to maintain the right commenting conditions to encourage participation from both their community and journalists.

“When dialogue isn’t healthy, and you don’t have the mechanisms to support civil conversation, the social environment quickly devolves,” Zohar says. “Your newsroom will not want to converse with an audience engaging in personal attacks, whether that be against the community or an author.”

So to keep conversations on-topic, troll-free and healthy, organizations must rely on support systems, like automated moderation and human moderators, to enforce community guidelines.

If you’re searching for an effective moderation system, keep an eye out for one that can automatically block up to 95% of offensive comments for the best results.

Organizations that keep their commenting spaces free from harmful content have the social power of their communities at their fingertips. Journalists can then tap into their audience’s healthy conversations to better connect with their readership and create content that people will actually want to stick around to read and pay for.

Viafoura achieves SOC 2 Type 1 certification

Viafoura, the leading digital experience company for global media organizations, is pleased to announce that it has successfully completed the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 1 audit and achieved SOC 2 Type 1 certification.

“As a SaaS company, we take our customers’ data security very seriously,” says Mark Zohar, President and COO of Viafoura. “Obtaining SOC 2 certification is a testament to Viafoura’s commitment to the security, integrity and availability of our platform. It also ensures that our customers will receive the highest level of security, trust and compliance.”

A SOC 2 Type 1 audit looks at all the controls and processes within a SaaS or cloud vendor’s ecosystems that manage customer information, and makes sure they meet the five trust principles of data. These trust principles are security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

The SOC 2 audit is technical and strict, measuring the process a SaaS or cloud vendor employs to monitor unusual activity, and how they’re equipped to respond with corrective action.

“SOC2 compliance assures our customers and prospects that we have taken all the steps necessary to protect and safeguard their data,” Zohar says. “Our mission as a company is to create civil and brand-safe online communities that engage and activate digital audiences. This mission cannot be achieved without a strong investment in and commitment to data security and compliance.”

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.

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.”