Tag: media organizations

4 on-site experiences and engagement tactics you can use to gather data on your audience

Getting to know your audience is a long-term process. If you want to know what makes them tick, you need to convert anonymous users into known users before you can start gathering first-party data to better understand their needs. 

Converting unknown to known is the key to driving your entire business forward and helping you reclaim your audience from social media. One of the easiest ways to do this is by engaging your community and creating a space that people want to participate in. 

Using community engagement solutions creates added value for unknown users, who can then subscribe and start their relationship with you. 

Once you’ve converted unknown to known, there are some core tools you can use to help better understand your user’s behaviour, preferences, and tendencies so you know how to create a more relevant and engaging on-site experience. 

Below, we’re going to look at four experiences and engagement solutions you can use to gather data on your audience.

1. A gated comments section

The first step of converting users from unknown to known is to gate your comment section so that only subscribed users can participate in the conversation and communicate with other users. 

14% of Americans comment on the news, so providing a gated comments section provides these users with a strong incentive to register so they can engage in conversations with other users on your site about the topics that interest them. 

This incentive is critical not just for getting them to start actively participating in your community, but also to start gathering first-party data on their preferences. This data can tell you not only what type of content they engage with the most, but their sentiments on particular topics that you can use to guide future content creation.

2. Live content

One way to better understand your user’s behaviour is to host live content. Live content like Ask Me Anything sessions (AMA), Q&As, and live blogs allow you to cover live events and curate stories in real-time while giving your audience a valuable opportunity to interact with your journalists or experts. 

Having the opportunity to ask questions is something that many users are crying out for, with 60.9% of commenters or comment readers saying they would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in news comment sections, while 58.7% say they would like it if experts on the topic of the article responded to comments in news comment sections. 

One way to use live content was illustrated by UK news publisher Reach PLC, which offered a live chat section mid-article on sports-related articles relating to team signings and other topics that gave fans a space to come together and discuss the news cycle. 

These interactions are valuable because you can gather quantitative feedback on the types of content they’re interested in. If there’s lots of discussion about a sports team signing new players, then you could focus on covering some of the smaller news stories around the new players to see what effect that has on engagement.

Business analytics on tablet computer

3. Audience analytics

When it comes to developing more sophisticated insights into your users, audience analytics is perhaps the most useful. A community engagement tool that provides analytics can extract behaviour signals to identify new types of subscribers who are likely to register, so you can develop content to help optimize those conversions. 

Audience analytics are an important resource because they helps you to better understand the first-party data collected from your users, so you develop more perspective into their preferences that go well beyond age and demographics, and into more granular segments. 

It’s important to note that the longer you use audience analytics, the richer the insights into their preferences. Collecting that initial first-party data and analyzing it long-term can help you see your audience from a new angle.

4. Personalized newsfeeds

If your content isn’t relevant to your users, then it’s unlikely to interest them. So if you want to optimize engagement, then you need to provide your audience with relevant content recommendations. 

Using an AI-powered community engagement platform to develop personalized newsfeeds makes it easy to gather data on your audience because you can identify what types of content a user interacts with the most, their opinions on it, and how they react to particular topics or journalists. 

For instance, if a user reads everything written by one of your writers about NFL-related news, you can route new articles straight to their feed, so they can find their content immediately without having to waste time searching the site.

Building your relationship with your audience is the key to growth

A media company’s growth is directly tied to its relationship with its audience. The closer you are to your audience, the greater the value you can offer not just to your users but also to your advertisers. 

The moment an unknown user decides to subscribe to your site and becomes a registered user, the data you can collect about them and their preferences become much richer and more valuable, both to your organization and potential advertisers.

The top 5 reasons people don’t participate in a news brand’s comments section, and how to change their minds

Building an active user community goes far beyond adding a comments section to your site. If you want your audience to participate in the conversation, you need a strategy to attract and nurture unregistered users.

Part of that strategy involves enticing users to engage with interactive, personalized content and recommendations, and the other involves lowering the barriers to entry and making your community more accessible to your audience. 

Below we’re going to look at the top 5 reasons people don’t participate in communities around news brands, and what tools you can use to create a civil and thriving community.

1. They don’t want to be the first to comment

If you’re trying to establish a new user community, your comments section won’t have many, if any, commenters. At the same time, your users might be hesitant to be the first to comment on a post. 

You can address this challenge quite easily by encouraging authors to pin comments inviting users to participate in the conversation in the comments section. 

For instance, an author can post the first comment on an article requesting open and honest feedback and pin it to the top. This approach sets the tone and welcomes users to leave their opinions.

2. They’re put off by toxic comments

Toxicity is one of the main reasons why some people don’t take part in online communities. No one enjoys being abused or harassed, and without proactive moderation, even a civil conversation can devolve into chaos. 

The prevalence of online toxicity, particularly on social media, was highlighted just a few months ago when CBC announced that it was closing Facebook comments on news posts due to “an inordinate amount of hate, abuse, misogyny and threats.” 

Using a community engagement tool with AI-driven moderation capabilities is critical for automatically taking down negative comments and creating a safe space for users to post and engage in civil discussions free of harassment and abuse.

Four adults looking at something on a tablet.

3. Your content isn’t relevant or engaging

In many cases, users don’t interact with content because they find it dull or uninteresting. If your audience doesn’t find an article compelling or relevant to their interests, they’re unlikely to engage with it and comment. 

The only way to address this is to provide more relevant content and personalized recommendations. You can do this by prompting users to subscribe and gathering first-party data to segment your audience into cohorts with similar interests. You can then use this data to recommend content that’s more likely to engage them.

For instance, if a user is interested in cryptocurrency news on Bitcoin and Ethereum, a community engagement platform can understand these interests and notify them whenever a writer releases a new article on a relevant topic or if a commenter they follow comments on the article.

4. They don’t have a reason to comment

Sometimes even if a piece of content is interesting, users won’t participate in the comments section or the community surrounding it because there’s no incentive or reason to leave a comment. 

Using interactive content like live blogs, Q&As, and Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions can help you provide the audience with a reason to comment by granting them an opportunity to engage with gated individuals like journalists, subject matter experts, and other well-known figures to increase not just registrations, but also time-on-page. 

The Independent used live content to great success during the pandemic by doing a live Q&A with a travel expert on the UK’s COVID-related restrictions. Likewise, MPR used a live blog to offer real-time coverage of the Kimberly Potter trial, with a comments section for users.

5. They don’t know you have a user community

Users won’t join a community if they don’t know it exists. While adding a comments section is a crucial step in creating a user community, your audience isn’t going to use it if they don’t know it’s there.

Announcing the launch of your user community on your site with a blog is essential for making your audience aware that they have a chance to communicate with other individuals. 

Many media organizations have used this strategy to kick-start their user community growth. For example, Xtra Magazine announced the launch of the Xtra Community through a blog post, as did TheTimes-Tribune.com, which released an announcement to promote the launch of a new commenting platform.

Make your comments section safe and relevant

To encourage users to participate in your community, the most important thing is to make sure that you’re offering your audience the opportunity to consume and engage with relevant content in a safe environment.

Using a community engagement tool with moderation capabilities gives you the best of both worlds. You can gather first-party data on users’ preferences to inform future content creation, while also using AI moderation to automatically remove abusive comments and create a safe space.

La Nación launches Viafoura’s Conversations on its platform with goal of boosting registrations and civil dialogue

La Nación, Argentina’s preeminent conservative newspaper, has launched Viafoura’s digital experience platform on its website, integrating the latter’s industry-leading Conversations solution. Viafoura’s Conversations will enable automated comment moderation on La Nación’s site, while also capturing data and analytics about the media company’s registered users. The Conversations solution also includes a community feed, the option to follow topics and/or authors, and a trending content carousel.

With 46 million monthly users and 343,000 paid subscribers, La Nación wanted to cultivate and nurture its community, while making it easy for readers to express themselves.

“One of our objectives is to increase our registered users’ interactions,” says Juan Alvarez, product manager at La Nación. “By switching to Viafoura, only our registered users can comment, so we hope it promotes a civil dialogue while helping our users have more mindful interactions.”

Before adopting Viafoura’s digital experience platform, La Nación was using Livefyre. Alvarez notes that his team wanted to improve the newspaper’s community experience beyond commenting, while also increasing engagement, registrations, subscriptions, time on site, and return visits.

La Nacion comments powered by Viafoura Conversations.

Part of what convinced La Nación to choose Viafoura was the scope of what the Conversations solution could offer, as well as recommendations from other trusted media brands.

But once the contract was signed, what impressed Alvarez the most was the high quality of service his team received from Viafoura. Implementing the solution happened in a short amount of time, and regular meetings helped guide La Nación’s team through the queries about the technology. Translation services were also provided during meetings to facilitate communication where needed. Alvarez adds that technical support since launching the solution has been especially efficient.

“We aim to grow our community hand-in-hand with Viafoura,” says Alvarez. “We hope to implement more solutions in the future and to continue to promote our community’s growth.”

Viafoura shares Alvarez’s enthusiasm for what’s ahead.

“We’re so excited to expand our reach in Argentina with the wonderful team at La Nación,” says Dalia Vainer, director of customer experience at Viafoura. “We’re looking forward to growing their engaged community while highlighting civility and creating a seamless end-to-end user engagement series!”

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.

How Media Companies Around the World Are Succeeding

Over the past few months, media organizations have had to endure one challenge after another. Some companies are now struggling to compensate for declining print and ad revenues sparked by these challenges. Meanwhile, others have exceeded their revenue targets and continue to position themselves for growth by adapting to the evolving markets.

After surveying 25 industry executives, an advisory firm exposed how media professionals are persevering by embracing change and innovation. 

“All [survey respondents] are innovating with new business lines and new served markets,” says Tony Silber, president of a content and marketing company. “From digital products to virtual events, from research and data to lead generation and subscription boxes, there’s a lot going on.”

Many players across the media landscape are succeeding. So why not learn from what others have already done right and apply those best practices to your business? 

We’ve laid out some profitable strategies below that have helped organizations all over the world grow and succeed.

Spain — El Pais and Building Audience Relationships

For many industry professionals, the paywall is an art form that must be tested, tweaked and mastered over time. However, El Pais, a Spanish news media company, quickly earned over 90,000 digital subscribers not even a year after launching its paywall. 

The organization was able to spark rapid subscriber growth by strengthening its relationship with each website visitor before sending out paywall messages. 

By leveraging a metered paywall, El Pais gave users access to 10 articles each month so they could sample content and understand why it would be worth paying for. 

Forming a relationship with digital visitors before asking them to pay helped El Pais prove the value of its subscription program to visitors.

The U.K. — Future PLC and First-Party Data

In 2020 alone, Future boosted its revenue by 65% compared to the previous year. One of the reasons the company has flourished to such an extent is because it has tailored its business strategies based on its audience’s behaviors and interests using first-party data. 

According to the chief executive of Future, Zillah Byng-Thorne, “Future has continued to thrive by knowing what our audiences value most, enabling us to take advantage of the changing market landscape to continue to deliver incredible content to our communities in whatever way meets their needs.”

By personalizing user experiences around its brand and its advertisers, Future is at an advantage against competitors and is well-prepared for the loss of third-party cookies.

Bangladesh — The Daily Star and Audience Engagement

When COVID-19 initially forced people into isolation back in 2020, The Daily Star, a Bangladesh media company, launched a campaign that earned itself a medal for engaging its audience. The digital campaign aimed to thoroughly engage people and connect isolated individuals through a microsite, where they could share stories and interact together. 

While this campaign was temporary, media companies that have integrated audience engagement into their sites have seen tremendous growth across user registrations and retention. 

Viafoura data scientists have even found that engagement tools drive 30% to 50% of user registrations. They’ve also discovered how engaged users spend three times longer on-site than unengaged users. 

In a world where in-person human interaction is limited, digital social tools help companies build meaningful connections to visitors and positive experiences worth sticking around for.

The U.S. — The New York Times and Diversifying Revenue Streams

The New York Times made headlines earlier this year after it announced that its digital revenue has finally surpassed its print revenue. The media company has thrived amid the pandemic by investing in several different revenue streams, producing over 7.5 million paying subscribers.

“Consumer revenue streams, including digital subscriptions and ticketed live events, are increasingly important to news organizations as reliance on traditional advertising revenues continues to decrease,” states Angelica Irizarry, who directs live events at The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

For The New York Times, it was necessary to go beyond advertising to become self-sustaining. That meant pivoting to prioritize subscription-based revenue, powered by a variety of revenue-generating products, including its digital news content, online events as well as cooking and game apps.

New Zealand — Stuff and Audience Ownership

Stuff, a New Zealand-based news company, completely abandoned Facebook in 2020. You may be questioning why Stuff would leave Facebook when it could interact with followers and reach new audiences on the platform. But there was a method to Stuff’s madness.

From the ban on news in Australia and data leaks to hoards of trolls, misinformation and bots, social media doesn’t have the greatest track record with publishers or the public. Stuff’s mission became to build direct relationships with its audience, away from the negative and unpredictable influences on Facebook.

Not only did the New Zealand company maintain its traffic after abandoning Facebook, but it’s also established a reputation for itself as a resource for trusted content.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights how Stuff has “benefited from huge public support, growth in trust, and happier newsroom staff who are no longer being trolled.”

Organizations around the world all have to deal with different policies, economies and events. However, surviving as a self-sustaining business and continuing to grow are universal goals that media companies have in common.

Understanding what other organizations have done successfully to achieve these goals can help to refine and perfect your own business’ growth strategies.

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