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What Traditional Media Companies Can Learn From Social Media Companies?

Over the past decade plus, we’ve seen social media evolve from a trend that kept people connected to arguably the most important and influential medium in modern society. More than just a way to share photos with friends, social media has grown into a space to share information, exchange ideas, and discover new communities. As we’ve seen from countless newspapers who failed to adapt to creating online content, traditional media companies can still learn a lot from social media organizations.

How social media changed consumption

Social media has changed not only the way we interact with each other, but also the way that content is consumed. For better or worse, many users want quick digestible content that they have the option of learning more through either a link to more longform content or the opportunity to react and discuss with other community members. That said, we’re now seeing a growth of social media intelligence, where most users are aware of lazy tactics such as clickbait or misleading headlines, and will have negative emotions towards any organization attempting to generate attention this way.

A traditional media company may look at a social media organization and see that audiences want quick, digestible content and find frustration in the fact that users aren’t sharing their content no matter how digestible it may be. However, these organizations are missing one key factor that social media companies thrive on.

The most successful social media companies thrive because they are able to target users with not just any digestible content, but content that matches their specific interests. By finding out what it is that each user wants to read, enjoys seeing, and is open to discussing, social media organizations can curate each user’s individual feed to provide an onslaught of content designed specifically for them. While this level of personalization can come across as exceedingly intimidating for a small startup that doesn’t have the resources that larger social media brands do, the lesson comes down to one simple point.

Know your audience

By leveraging data from their community to create personalized news feeds, advertising and programming as well as building a group of like-minded individuals who have an interest in discussing and expanding on the shared content, traditional media companies can provide some of the curated content that users love to experience from their favourite social media platforms.

Personalization can turn into a habit forming retention strategy

Through creating a personalized landing page, organizations are able to build habit forming behavior for their users. Many of the most successful social media companies even take it a step further and implement some sort of notification tool such as the bell icon found on both YouTube and Twitter that will immediately alert those who opt-in of any new content through a push notification. It works as not only an effective retention strategy that keeps users coming back for more with daily frequency, but also helps to keep those same users informed on the most recent conversations so that they can contribute to discussions and assist in growing the community.

Typically, people enjoy some sort of routine and familiarity which is why name recognition, brand loyalty and ease of use are such important factors to how people choose to consume online content. What social media companies thrive at is forming habits that in turn help create this brand loyalty. If someone is checking a specific Twitter account for news every day, then they’re more likely to have a positive association with that person and any other content that they may create.

In conclusion

While quality of a product is always the most important thing, social media is teaching all of us that quantity carries far more weight than traditional media companies originally thought. The days of quarterly, monthly, or even weekly papers are a relic of the past, as users now want new content on demand every time they glance at a publication. By providing something new every day, even if it’s just a short blurb or discussion, organizations can give their users a reason to keep coming back and build that positive association and loyalty that all media companies strive for.

First-Party Data Or Social Media Advertising: Which To Use?

Companies all over the world spend millions of dollars on social media advertising. For many years, it’s been one of the best avenues for brands seeking to expand their reach and visibility. By building a social following, brands gain direct access to customers already interested in their services and from there, speak to them directly and set about converting them into paying customers.

However, social media metrics leave much to the imagination, which is not an ideal way to set about developing audience strategies. Likes and comments on social posts are hard to quantify without more specific data, though some of the declarative data uncovered therein can help further an understanding of audience behaviors. Without access to concrete, sophisticated data, how can you build relevant audience profiles to augment your publishing strategy? And without those profiles, how do you know what to advertise to new audiences? How can you convince third-party affiliates to advertise on your site?

Publishers have recognized first-party data as not only a viable alternative to social media metrics, but a far more valuable resource with rich insights instrumental to audience growth and activation, subscription revenue, ad revenue, retention, and so much more. By investing in a first-party data strategy and taking advantage of resources that help you acquire, analyze, and interpret insights, publishers can track audience engagement across their digital property portfolios. By doing so, they’re able to make informed strategic decisions that drive conversion and support the efficacy of their audience funnels, thus ushering unregistered visitors into paid subscriptions.

Publishers report less value in social media advertising

A telling sign of how publishers are rethinking their approach to audience insights and how to spend their advertising dollars is revealed through the Publishers and Social Media: 2021 Trends report conducted by Echobox.

Based on a survey of 159 publishers from over 40 different countries, the findings revealed that 63% of respondents believed discovering and tapping into new audiences is now more important than ever. For publishers hoping to lead the curve, this report indicates an evident need for audience expansion strategies that connect to fresh eyed audiences as opposed to relying on brand-aware users who sought them out through social media channels.

In the same study, only 29% of publishers chose to prioritize investments in new social media channels. While many respondents said social media continues to be an excellent resource for “more referral traffic,” little is mentioned about the conversion rate to transform referral traffic into paid content subscriptions.

Additionally, social media algorithms continue to remain beyond the control of publishers who must do their best to anticipate upcoming changes and implement contingency plans for detrimental algorithmic changes. Four out of ten respondents say constant changes to Facebook’s algorithm cause an extreme and unexpected impact on traffic. This inconsistency makes it hard for publishers to predict accurate growth in both website visits and new subscription rates.

First-party data is a response to the changing times

Sometimes, the best growth strategy is less about bringing in more traffic from social media to a publishing site and more closely tied to establishing an approach that optimizes existing traffic with behavioral data. These insights are used by publishers to enhance content strategies by aligning writers and editors around data-driven audience insights. Data-informed teams are far better prepared to produce more content that strikes a chord with audiences and leaves them eager for more and prone to return visits with longer page visit durations.

Part of the reason for this approach is in reaction to updated consumer privacy protection laws. Mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy protection legislation have begun a depreciation, or retirement, of third-party cookies, which Google will indefinitely eliminate by 2023. These cookies have traditionally been used by brands and publishers to acquire audience insights and support advertising campaigns.

According to Google, 90% of North and South American publishers say stricter consumer privacy laws have forced them to adapt their strategies. Now, the vast majority of these publishers are leaning into first-party data in order to acquire more accurate and detailed information about their customers. First-party data allows publishers to build enriched audience profiles that third-party cookies and social media engagement could never provide.

Publisher ownership of first-party data leverages revenue-driven affiliate partnerships

First-party data gives publishers the insights and sophisticated specificity to enhance and take ownership of the direct relationship with their audiences. Since audience insights are acquired through reader interaction with published content, publishers retain the rights to that first-party data. This provides powerful leverage for publishers to increase advertising revenue through highly curated partnerships with specific affiliate advertisers.

It’s a great way to appeal to affiliates eager to advertise at a time when advertising budgets are being cut. Recent economic downturns have forced companies to scale back on their ad budgets, though they do still need to generate awareness and engagement.

As the proprietors of detailed first-party audience data, publishers can incentivize affiliate advertisers to spend their limited budgets wisely on ad inserts with the greatest potential for engagement and conversion. It’s a strategy that companies like Trusted Media Brands have successfully delivered upon, which has generated 40% year over year programmatic revenue growth.

Social media casts a wide net; first-party data chooses the right bait

When calculating the ROI on advertising campaigns, a helpful way to look at the dichotomy between social media advertising and using first-party data to connect with affiliates is to think of it like an analogy for fishing.

Social media advertising is essentially casting a wide net out into the digital ocean. The hope is that you use the social media algorithms effectively to maximize reach and engagement. Through that engagement, you need high clickthrough rates (CTRs) so that you have the best potential to grow paid subscribers of your content. Those subscriptions are the final achievement to prove the merit behind your social media advertising strategy.

There are a lot of holes in that approach, which is why using a first-party data strategy to convince affiliates that they should advertise on your site is far more effective. With first-party data and the audience profiles and segmentation it can provide, you don’t need to cast a wide net and hope for the best. Instead, you’re in a position to convince the right affiliates that their products and messaging have the greatest potential to connect with the consumers that make up your engaged audiences. When we choose the right bait, we stand a greater chance of catching exactly what we’re after.

First-party data is a win for publications and audiences alike. Audiences benefit from the improvements it informs and appreciate the thoughtful content produced for their interests. Publishers on the other hand stand to benefit greatly from the ability to appeal to their affiliates and encourage them to invest more of their advertising budgets into developing extensive relationships with their publication. Everybody wins and everybody gets more of what they want!

4 reasons to stop depending on social media for audience data and community building

Over-reliance on social media is one of the biggest mistakes that media companies make. Many brands spend so much time and money trying to develop content for social media even though their business models don’t benefit media organizations, nor are their community guidelines aligned.

Worse still, even if an organization builds a following on social media, their operations are susceptible to social media companies and big-tech changing rules that can destroy their hard work overnight.

The writing on the wall is that over the long term, depending on social media for audience data is a lost cause.

With Pew Research finding that the percentage of US adults getting their news from social media decreased from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021, now is the ideal time for companies to start investing in building their communities on their own websites, so they can start collecting, maintaining, and learning from their first-party data.

We’ll examine four reasons to reduce your dependency on social media, so that you can generate better results for your content.

1. Gathering first-party data

One of the core problems with staying on social media is that you have to rely on third parties to collect data on your audience. While social media providers’ analytics solutions are useful, they give you limited controls over how you analyze user data and the insights you can gain into their preferences.

By moving off social media and building a user community on your owned and operated sites, you can collect first-party data from your audience and provide customers with new data signals that they don’t currently have to enhance your data strategy. This also allows you to make better editorial and personalization decisions.

The ability to develop more sophisticated insights is a key reason why 88% of marketers say collecting first-party data was a priority last year.

2. Reducing toxicity

It’s no secret that toxicity, harassment, and abuse on social media are rampant. Organizations like Facebook and Twitter have consistently failed to address these issues, both for audiences and journalists.

A recent survey found that 8 out of 10 journalists said harassment on social media is a “very big” or “moderately big” problem. Another study finds that 79% of users say social media companies are doing an only fair or poor job of addressing online harassment or bullying.

To prevent toxicity and ensure commenters and journalists alike are safe to voice their opinions, it’s critical to build a user community on your site with an AI-moderated community engagement solution that can automatically remove hateful or abusive content before it deters users from contributing to the conversation.

3. Creating a connection with your audience

Building a connection with your audience is vital for establishing long-term loyalty and keeping users coming back for more. Developing a user community on your site and providing opportunities for them to influence the direction of live content is an excellent way to show you value their opinions.

For example, a journalist can produce a Q&A session on current events, from the Ukraine war to COVID-19 travel restrictions, to answer the audience’s top questions and offer more relevant content or coverage.

Live blogs, Q&As and AMA sessions are all examples of content you can create on your site that you can’t replicate on social media, and are used by some of the top media companies in the world, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Independent.

4. Limited reach on social media

In recent years, social media companies have become increasingly pay-to-play and limited the organic reach of content to incentivize organizations to pay for advertising to reach users. This has had the side effect of decreasing the visibility of free content.

For instance, Facebook posts reach an average of 2.2% of followers on a page, which makes it difficult to deliver content to users consistently.

So if you want to maximize engagement on your content, you need to offer it to your audience on your own site and use platforms like Facebook and Twitter as tools to funnel traffic.

Stop using social media to build a user community

Social media is a useful tool for advertising your brand, but it’s not the best place to build a user community, start a conversation, or generate detailed insights into your audience.

By implementing community engagement solutions on your owned and operated digital properties, you can put your site at the heart of your user community and start gathering first-party audience data to better understand your users’ interests and preferences.

How to reclaim your audience from social media and build an engaged community on your owned and operated site

Your audience is a core part of your brand, so when you completely outsource your community to a third-party social media platform, you’re letting big tech take control of your relationship with your audience, you’re also losing access to valuable first-party data you can leverage to better understand their preferences.

However, it’s important to note that media organizations don’t need to get off social media completely. With 4.5 billion social media users around the world, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer widespread opportunities for user acquisition. The key is to have a strategy to reclaim website traffic from social media.

In this article, we’re going to look at the top three reasons you need to reclaim your audience from social media and how you can build a nurtured and engaged community on your owned and operated sites.

3 reasons to reclaim your audience from social media

When building your audience or your following online, there are three main reasons you should always prioritize engaging your audience on your owned and operated sites over third-party social media platforms. These are as follows:

1. Building a direct relationship with your audience

If all your interactions with your audience take place on social media, you’re implicitly relying on a third party to determine how you can engage with your followers, and you’re making yourself vulnerable to policy changes that impact your community.

For instance, if your media organization has a Facebook page, Facebook can decide that your content violates its community guidelines and take the page down. Or, if Facebook suddenly changes its algorithm, your community can disappear overnight, wasting all the time you’ve invested into building that audience.

Making sure that most direct interactions with your audience take place on your site gives you more control over the conversation. It also ensures that your content isn’t subject to abstract community guidelines and social media moderation standards, so you can interact with your audience however you see fit.

2. Get to know your audience with first-party data

Publishers that rely on social media traffic to build their audience not only find themselves beholden to third-party policies but also lose the ability to collect first-party data. If users don’t visit your site, it’s difficult to gather data that could otherwise provide you with insights into their preferences.

While social media platforms like Twitter offer analytics solutions, these are generalist solutions that won’t necessarily be tailored to generate the insights into your audience that you need to compete against other media organizations and publishers.

Directing users to your site and collecting first-party data from subscribed members of the audience can help you generate insights into your audience’s preferences, while developing more relevant content and forming a closer relationship with your community over time.

3. Ensuring a civil community

Another challenge is relying on social media companies to moderate conversations, which they don’t do very well, as illustrated during Euro 2020 when England’s soccer team received over 2,000 abusive messages on Twitter.

If one of your journalists gets harassed on a website like Twitter with death threats, racist attacks, or harassment, you have to report the incidents and then wait for the site to investigate and take action.

On the other hand, if you move the conversation to your site, you can use an AI-driven community engagement solution to automatically moderate comments according to a customized moderation policy. That means if someone tries to leave a hateful comment, you can instantly block it so it doesn’t negatively impact the experience of other users.

Magnet attracting metal marbles to demonstrate attracting an audience.

How to support user retention and registration once they’re on your site

Once you get your audience from social media onto your site, there are a number of strategies you can use to maximize user retention and registration to ensure they engage with your brand.

1. Incentivize unsubscribed users to register

The best way to support user registration on your site is to provide visitors with an incentive to register. An incentive can be as simple as a gated comment section or user community, which they have to sign up for if they want to leave comments and interact with other users, or a newsletter providing valuable content not available on your surface site.

2. Start collecting first-party data

Once users have registered, you can start to collect first-party data about their preferences and sentiments, which you can use to develop propensity models and better understand the type of content they want to see.

3. Use AI-Driven moderation

Finally, you can help to retain users on your site by keeping the conversation civil with a proactive moderation policy. Rooting out harassment, racism, and spam is critical for making sure that users can have productive and engaging conversations on your site, without being overwhelmed with toxicity or junk content.

Use social media for acquisitions, not engagement

Building a following on your owned and operated sites and social media aren’t mutually exclusive. Social media traffic is great for user acquisition and for driving referrals, but you should always be looking to drive users to your owned and operated sites so you can have a deeper interaction and establish a long-term relationship with them.

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.

Rebuilding Trust: Convincing Skeptical News Readers to Convert

Spotlight:

Trust in media is dwindling, with more than half of news consumers (58%) skeptical of media companies.
Although 50% of people lose interest in content near toxic behavior, you can moderate on-site social spaces to build trust around content.
Since news sites are 25% more trusted than social media, news organizations should focus on building relationships with audiences on their own properties.
Subject matter experts can participate in the content creation process to boost brand authority over specific topics.
Media companies can integrate first-party data into their content strategies to convince news readers to trust their brands for relevant content and experiences.
Community engagement tools, like Viafoura’s Engagement Suite, paired with trust-building strategies can help companies establish authority and increase conversions.

Misinformation from global leaders and social media in the past has severely damaged people’s trust in content online. As a result, a large portion of the public is extremely critical of content created by media organizations.

Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer report reveals that more than half of consumers no longer trust the media.

In fact, Edelman’s study highlights that 58% of people think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”

But trust is an essential ingredient that media companies need if they want to develop long-lasting relationships with audiences.

To convince people to become registered users, community members and paying subscribers, media companies must rebuild their reputations as trustworthy resources.

Uncover a few practical ways you can encourage skeptical audiences to trust your company for news content and safe digital experiences below.

Moderate Your Company’s Discussion Spaces

Social spaces help media companies engage and convert people around their content, but these areas can also become overridden with trolls, misinformation, and offensive comments without constant moderation.

And unfortunately, a toxic environment can undermine any trustworthy content or experiences hosted within it.

If you want to protect your audience members and reinforce the safe, trusted nature of your business, comment moderation is a necessity for your on-site discussion spaces. Especially since 50% of people that experience toxic behavior online will lose interest in nearby content.

Implementing an effective comment moderation solution on your company’s website or app will show audiences that they can trust your organization for positive content experiences.

Reduce Your Dependence on Social Media

While most media companies use social media to reach and engage audiences, a significant amount of people no longer trust social media. This means any content your organization posts on social media won’t be seen as reliable information by default.

A report from the Reuters Institute outlines how sources on social media “[seem] interchangeable, making it difficult to discern where stories originated online and even [undermine] trust in the information environment more generally.”

It’s no surprise that, on average, people trust information on news sites 25% more than on social media.

The bottom line is that social media has earned itself a reputation for creating data leaks, rewarding misinformation in its algorithms and failing to moderate offensive behavior. And the only way to disassociate yourself from social media’s negative reputation and establish trust with readers is to engage them right on your own properties.

Consider implementing on-site commenting tools and providing personalized reader experiences on your website or app to build trust and nurture audience relationships.

Feature Subject Matter Experts in Content

There’s nothing that can build credibility around a particular topic quite as well as a qualified subject matter expert (SME) can. So to develop your organization’s authority over a specific subject, you can interview and quote SMEs in your content or even commission them to write a piece for your company.

Scientific American, for instance, enlists the help of practitioners to create about half of its content to help educate people as much as possible.

“[Scientific] topics, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, advice pages on topics such as home remodeling… or advice on parenting issues…. should also come from “expert” or experienced sources that users can trust,” explains Jonathan Hedger, the marketing director for an app that connects people to freelance SMEs.

Since SMEs have dedicated their careers and lives to learning about a particular subject, their voice often carries more authority and trust than an average journalist.

Create Content and Experiences Based on Unique Reader Interests

What’s your company doing to ensure readers can trust it for content that’s captivating and relevant?

Give readers the content and experiences they want by using your first-party data to understand their preferences. From there, you can adjust your company’s content and on-site experiences to align with reader interests.

“If you understand who your audience is… it allows you to [optimize] your offering around them,” says Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant and expert on subscriptions. “It allows you to keep [their interest] for a long time, build loyalty and trust, and expand the relationship over time.”

You can partner with Viafoura to host engaging experiences for readers across your digital properties and collect critical first-party engagement and behavioral data.

At the end of the day, trust is easy to lose and challenging to regain.

But with the proper support and trust-building strategies in place, you can convert skeptical news readers into loyal, paying community members.

After Facebook’s News Ban in Australia, Media Organizations Must Start Owning Their Audiences

In what was perhaps one of Facebook’s most aggressive moves so far, the social media giant last week blocked all news content and links from its platform in Australia. All news pages, and even some government pages, were wiped clean and news organizations were unable to deliver critical information to millions of Facebook’s users.

Facebook’s decision to ban news came after Australia’s government proposed to make big tech giants legally obligated to pay news companies for the content they host.

And while there has been some reconciliation between Facebook and the Australian government resulting in the recent restoration of news content, there’s a greater issue at hand: Big tech giants could abandon countries at any time, without any notice.

In fact, a similar event happened back in 2014, when Google closed its news aggregation services in Spain.

If there’s one takeaway we can learn from this issue, it’s that news media companies need to stop relying on big tech platforms to engage their audience and start building thriving, digital communities of their own. If they don’t, they risk losing the bulk of their traffic overnight.

The Dangers of Not Owning Your Audience

By allowing a third-party platform, like Facebook, to act as a middleman between your brand and its followers, you have no direct ownership over your audience. This scenario creates several challenges for your company.

First off, if you don’t own your audience members, you have limited access to their data. Having access to this first-party data will be the single most important thing for media brands in the coming months and years. Not to mention you can’t prevent your content from showing up near misinformation or falling prey to trolls on other platforms — and that can significantly damage your brand’s reputation.

Meanwhile, you’re at the unpredictable whims and algorithms of a third party, which can disconnect you from your audience in the blink of an eye. That was certainly the case for Australian media companies when Facebook wiped news from its platform without hesitation.

“Web traffic to Australian news sites began to drop significantly just hours after the ban,” reports Business Insider.

Media companies that initially thrived on the platform and had most of their website traffic travel through Facebook can no longer tap into that audience.

With news making up only 4% of Facebook’s content, it doesn’t make sense for media business leaders to put their trust in a platform that has no loyalty to news companies.

Where Media Organizations Need To Go From Here

There’s no question that news companies need to stop relying on Facebook for growth and revenue. So what can shell-shocked publishers that depended on Facebook for traffic, or other big tech platforms for that matter, do to become self-sufficient?

The answer is surprisingly simple: They need to start rebuilding their communities on their own digital properties, where they have complete ownership over their visitors, their data and their revenue. Organizations that take control of their audiences can also encourage visitors to depend on their digital properties instead of social media for trusted content.

“The long-term task for news [organizations] and journalists is to convince the public – especially young people – that it’s worthwhile to actively seek out professional news and journalism as part of their daily online lives, rather than simply reading whatever comes across their feed,” states Diana Bossio, a lecturer for media and communications at the Swinburne University of Technology.

If media companies can form strong, direct relationships with their digital community members on their own properties, they’ll be well on their way toward generating sustainable revenue.

Why On-Site Engagement Tools Can Help Media Companies Reclaim Their Independence

Between 2019 and 2020, consumers worldwide spent an average of 145 minutes on social media each day being, well, social.

And this isn’t surprising: Engaging social experiences encourage people to connect and participate in ongoing digital conversations. But that doesn’t mean you need to rely on social media to engage your audiences socially.

To encourage loyal audiences to form a direct path to your website or app, you can adopt moderated social engagement tools right on your digital properties. From built-in conversation and live chat widgets to live blog tools and personalized social feeds, there are several ways media organizations can embed social experiences into their websites or apps.

Viafoura data reveals how social engagement tools help media companies activate and retain their audiences. Not only do engagement tools drive between 30% and 50% of all user registrations on Viafoura’s customer sites, but engaged users spend three times longer on media websites compared to unengaged users as well.

With the help of Viafoura’s audience engagement solution, media organizations even saw up to a 50% retention rate for engaged users after two months of visiting a site.

Conversation-based tools give users the addictive experiences of social platforms without sacrificing any of your company’s data, revenue or reputation to a third party.

Facebook’s ban on news in Australia had countless media organizations feeling betrayed and abandoned by the tech giant. And just as this wasn’t the first time a big tech company trampled over media organizations, it certainly won’t be the last.

By investing in building communities on your owned and operated digital properties, you can help your media company rise above the whims of tech giants and take control of your most valuable asset — your audience.

Warning Signs That Your Audience Isn’t Reaching Its Full Revenue-Generating Potential

With the proper engagement and retention strategies in place, your audience has the power to sustain your media company financially.

“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,” explains Angelica Irizarry, the Inquirer’s director of events.

There’s a clear connection between active audiences and elevated revenue. However, not all media organizations are tapping into the full value of their digital communities.

Keep your eyes open for the following warning signs, which indicate that your media company may be losing out on potential revenue from its community.

High Churn Rates

Your existing subscribers are often more valuable than new subscribers.

“It can cost five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one,” reads an article on Forbes.

In other words, having high churn in your digital community can translate to significant revenue loss for media companies.

So if your company has an unusually high churn rate, you may want to consider reinforcing your retention strategy.

Work with your engagement tool and paywall providers to identify unengaged community members that may be about to churn, and then send them unique offers and discounts to re-engage them. That way, you’ll maximize the revenue your existing customers are funneling into your organization.

High Amounts of Toxicity in the Comments

If you notice a climbing number of user-generated posts getting disabled by your moderation system, odds are, your digital social spaces are infested with trolls or spam.

Allowing offensive comments to overtake the meaningful, productive conversations within your digital properties can scare away advertisers and community members. And that means less revenue for your company in the long run.

“You can protect your social spaces by keeping your community guidelines up to date and ensuring your moderation system can properly enforce them,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation services at Viafoura. “To discourage trolling behavior, moderators and editors can also highlight and reward positive behavior whenever possible.”

Your Most Engaged Audience Is Coming From Social Media

We’re well aware that social media holds millions of active users and advertising opportunities for brands. But this comes at the cost of precious first-party data, direct relationships with audience members, trust and, ultimately, complete revenue ownership.

Having social media at the center of your community engagement strategy jeopardizes your company’s control over audience members and over any of the revenue earned from them.

Instead of giving a portion of your profits to big tech companies, there’s a better alternative for media companies: to invest in their own properties.

That’s what led one media to build a brand-new podcasting app rather than relying on a third-party podcast streamer.

“We needed it to be an experience that we control so we built apps to do this and the experience of doing the discovery, the experience of convenience, the experience of actually being in the Zetland universe when you listen to it, I think it’s quite important,” states Zetland CEO Tav Klitgaard.

Companies can even replicate the social experiences offered by social media directly on their own properties with the help of audience development companies like Viafoura, to keep visitors on their sites and interacting for longer.

Engagement Spaces Aren’t Being Leveraged for Ads

Integrating audience engagement tools into your website or app can help your organization activate interest and conversation around your brand. However, some media companies don’t realize that there’s a significant amount of advertising revenue that can be earned from audiences through these tools.

By failing to run advertisements in these social spaces, you’re missing out on the opportunity to maximize engagement around your ads. Organizations can instead become more successful by advertising to highly engaged community members.

“Today advertising value is measured by engagement so if publishers want to improve their ad offering, they must devise a successful engagement strategy first,” says Chris Waiting, CEO of The Conversation U.K.

As you work to build, retain and monetize community members, keep your eyes open for warning signs that your company may be losing out on potential profit. Adjusting your business strategies accordingly will help you increase the revenue your organization can earn from its audience.

Four Things Companies Are Doing to Take Their Subscription Strategies to the Next Level

Earning reader revenue isn’t a simple task in the media industry. Even with a paywall in place, those precious subscriptions won’t start pouring in on their own. Not unless your company has a strong subscription strategy.

So what kinds of subscription-driving tactics can delight visitors and convince them to become dedicated community members?

“We see subscribers weighing up personal benefits, such as distinctive content, convenience, and value, with perceived benefits for society,” state the authors of Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020.

This means that companies must cater to the needs and interests of consumers while serving their entire communities to create loyal subscribers.

For those of you who are hoping to strengthen your existing subscription strategy, there are several tactics worth trying out. Let’s look at some of the effective subscription strategies that publishers have recently implemented for some inspiration.

Personalizing the Visitor Experience With Audience Data

Audience data is a powerful tool that media companies can use to enrich their subscription strategies, satisfying the needs and desires of consumers.

ARA, a Spanish publisher in Barcelona, credits its 3,200 new subscribers largely to its use of first-party audience data. The media company closely assessed its community members to tailor their experiences to their behaviors and content interests.

“We want to know where our audiences are, how they consume, how they read our news and we started to produce more according to these audiences,” says Georgina Ferri Todera, the chief revenue and innovation officer at ARA. “But the first step was knowing more about our audiences.”

The Wall Street Journal has also recognized the need to start collecting audience data to personalize its subscribers’ experience. As a result, subscribers are more likely to have a positive digital experience and remain loyal to the brand.

Communicating Directly With Audiences

If you’re not sure what could make your company’s content and on-site experience more appealing to consumers, you can always turn to your audience for answers.

TIME, for instance, asked consumers directly about what resources it could provide to help people during the early stages of the pandemic.

“People told us what they want and we fulfilled it for them,” explains Maya Draisin, SVP of progress marketing at TIME. “And they responded with 1.5 million views.”

In general, your audience is your compass. By following their directions and fulfilling their needs, you can reinforce the value of your company’s content and subscription program.

Opting Out of Big Tech Platforms

For professionals in the digital world, the instinct to promote content across multiple social media and news aggregation channels is only natural. Many people expect to attract greater audiences and more subscribers by promoting content on third-party websites.

However, this approach can actually be counterproductive to your subscription program. Not only do consumers lack trust in the content on big tech platforms, but your company also loses revenue as well as precious audience data to the host platform.

The New York Times is one of the latest media companies to recognize the value of creating direct relationships with readers on its own properties.

After opting out of Apple’s news aggregation platform, the Time’s COO, Meredith Kopit Levien, stated that the company can form a “direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules.”

Build a direct relationship with readers to, therefore, earn their trust and forge daily habits that lead to long-term subscription growth.

Working Audience Engagement Into the Subscription Plan

While there’s no single right way to use a paywall, some publishers see merit in engaging audiences before revealing a subscription message.

This process helps consumers feel connected to media companies, and then when they’re active enough online, guides them to become loyal subscribers.

Slate is one of many publishers that have implemented this strategy.

“If you want people to join or subscribe, asking them to do it voluntarily is not quite enough,” explains Dan Check, CEO of Slate.

You can encourage on-site audience engagement through interactive tools and exceptional journalism before and after visitors subscribe to your services.

Go beyond your paywall by strengthening your company’s connection to its audience.

Whether you choose to replicate these strategies on your digital properties or not, your ability to increase your loyal subscribers all comes down to engaging and understanding consumers. Tie these core actions into your subscription strategy to create and retain a strong community of brand advocates.