UGC Archives | Viafoura

How UGC Contributors Boost Retention And Registrations

There’s an old marketing rule of thumb that successful companies emulate. It costs 5x more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. Companies that heavily invest in retention strategies increase the customer lifetime value (CLTV) of their customers, which translates into heavy cost savings as it requires less money to be spent on net new acquisition campaigns.

In the digital publishing industry, the model is very similar. Some studies suggest that converting unknown readers into new subscribers generates, on average, between a 5% to 20% success rate. On the other hand, converting registered or known users into subscribers is far more effective with success stories in a range of 60% to 70%.

How to build audiences: foster fast-paced communities

When you have communities of engaged readers, you’re more likely to create a lively forum. People love to express their opinions on a topic, especially if an argument has been so articulately laid out by a subject matter expert in a written article. A healthy commenting platform allows readers to share their own thoughts on the subject and open up a lively debate.

These UGC contributors demonstrate their affinity for your content by leaving their comments and engaging in lively discussions with other readers. This shows an active willingness on their part to increase their CLTV for your business.

On top of that, your UGC contributors can actively help you attract new readers at no additional cost. According to AdWeek, nearly half of millennials and over 35% of baby boomers trust UGC content over branded content. This means your commenting section can be one of your top acquisition channels. You just need to invest in a solid retention strategy to get your active UGC contributors to engage with the content.

Use first-party data to profile your most avid commenters

First-party data is fully consented data. At a time when consumer privacy is paramount and third-party cookies will be eliminated, first-party data has become the most valuable resource to help publishers gain a deeper understanding of their most avid consumers.

If a user creates an account on your site to read or comment on your content, that action is an example of first-party data. Each action that user takes from that point onward is a first-party data touchpoint that you can use to build a rich audience profile. Using a first-party data strategy, you can gain consent from audiences to:

Send more personalized notifications to your active readers
Develop segmented audience experiences based on user preferences
Boost community engagement by monitoring audience behavioral metrics
Deploy data-informed push notifications to increase engagement with premium content

Deploy content recommendation modules to boost audience engagement

Once you have data-driven audience profiles, you can start personalizing the experience on your website. Using your first-party data, you can identify common themes, topics, writers, keywords, and other commonalities that motivate your UGC contributors to leave a comment.

With those insights in hand, use your content recommendation modules to tailor the articles that appear for those users. Studies have shown that personalized content recommendations will boost paywall impression rates by at least 10% and conversion rates by 30%. You can motivate more readers to go beyond the paywall so that they can post their own thoughts and engage in healthy discussions with like-minded participants.

Encouraging UGC commenting and healthy discussions is a growth strategy that can prove to be very effective. The Independent, one of the world’s leading publications, used this exact commenting and conversion-based experience strategy. Over the course of 12 months, the Independent was able to add 2,000 new website registrations with comments.

Grow your community and encourage real-time conversation

As you profile highly engaged users, you can use your automated moderation tools to create a healthy digital community for your UGC contributors. Automated moderation tools are designed to keep communities engaged, prevent toxic or harassing comments, and reward meaningful contributors with special labels to elevate their status on the forum.

Creating a safe and healthy community for discussion is essential to boosting audience engagement. Studies have shown that 4 out of 10 news comment readers refuse to publish their own thoughts or opinions due to toxic or argumentative communities.

Remember that nearly half of all millennials and over one third of baby boomers trust UGC contributors over branded content. Audience engagement and UGC contributions are essential to create that vibrant community and encourage new readers to register their own rights to comment on your content.

If you’re not creating a healthy community to facilitate lively UGC discussions, you don’t have an effective retention and engagement strategy. And without an audience retention and engagement strategy, you can’t rely on your commenting section to help grow your business. Ultimately, you’re leaving a viable path for growth untouched on the table.

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.”

Driving SEO with User Generated Content

Viafoura is your partner in audience development and as such, we take SEO very seriously. We are one of the only major commenting and engagement platforms that natively support search indexing of our commenting tool (Facebook comments and Disqus do not). But SEO goes far beyond just allowing indexing. Here are some of the ways that Viafoura enables and optimizes SEO from our widgets on behalf of our clients:

Speed

Google has stated publicly that site speed is a significant factor in search ranking. Independent studies have confirmed that improving time to render, and especially start rendering time, are very highly correlated with higher page rank.

Viafoura helps to minimize the impact that our widgets have on site speed in the following ways:

Asynchronous loading: Our Javascript is loaded after displaying much of the immediately consumable page to the user. This aids in load speed and start rendering time while retaining the dynamic elements of the site.
On-demand loading: Comment widgets can be heavy due to the volume of content that they deliver and their technical complexity. For this reason, we load our comment widget only if the user scrolls close to where the widget will load. This ensures that our widget does not impact the start render time on the page.
Batching: A technique whereby we bundle multiple API calls into one which can speed up the experience, especially for mobile users.
Multiple Bundles: We break our Javascript into separate bundles which improves efficiency by only loading the components that are needed on that particular page.
Minification: Our Javascript is minified, a type of compression which removes unnecessary white-space and characters from the code. This results in reducing a file-size to almost one quarter of the original size.
Compression: We compress all communication from our servers using GZIP, which provides additional file-size savings.
CDN: We use a CDN (content delivery network with servers all over the world) to deliver our content (excluding API results) at low latency worldwide, by geographical region.
Caching: We cache our files so browsers will only download our files when they change (ie: once per release) except for critical components.
WebSockets: We use WebSockets to produce our real time events using an open data connection.
Font-icons: We use font-icons to bundle our icons into one file to reduce requests.
Avoid Sequential Requests: We minimize the number of sequential requests, reducing load times.

User-Generated Content

Viafoura Civility tools: our industry leading civility tools allow you to control the discourse on your site, ensuring the discourse is inline with your community guidelines, without needing a massive moderation effort. These tools include:

Automated On-site Moderation: Utilizing artificial intelligence based natural language processing and machine learning to detect and eliminate harassment, abuse, and other uncivil comments before they go live, ensuring that potentially damaging comments are prevented from being indexed.
Community Management: Empower your community to help manage the discourse themselves through flag threshold disabling of comments in addition to user-to-user muting.
Email Verification: Validate your users and impede multi-account creation with a sophisticated email verification system.
Display Name Moderation: Ensure that the display names on your website are not being used to post objectionable content or spam and therefore being read by search engine bots.
Avatar Verification: Prevent obscene or objectionable images from being posted in profile pictures by moderating user profile pictures.
User Banning: Allow moderators to give short “time outs” and inform users why they are being banned to help them improve.
Spam Detection: We offer industry leading 3-layer spam detection including NLP spam pattern detection.

Promoted comments: Our civility tools are the first line of defense to ensure the actual and perceived (by Google in this case) quality of your community. In addition, we have widgets that can be used to showcase the best comments higher in the page, thereby ensuring that the best comments are being indexed: These include:

Editor’s pick pull quote: This widget allows you to pull the very best of your comments into the body of your articles. This widget loads extremely fast, and places your user-generated content high in the page ensuring that Google will index the content. Google appears to favor content within the body of an article for ranking purposes.
Editor’s pick list: This highly customizable widget allows you to showcase the best of the best comments anywhere on your site by pulling in the best curated comments from your whole site or from the section that the comments appeared in.
Trending comments: This widget can be configured to showcase the comments that are getting the most “likes” on your site. This is a less curated way to promote the best comments on your site.

Dynamic page content: Pages with active content updates, such as new comments being posted, can trigger additional reindexing and improve the recency and relevance of the page in search results.

UGC Keywords: Terminology your audience may use around a topic can often differ from what journalists would write and can provide closer matches to user-generated search terms.

Competitive Comparison

	Article Indexed	Widgets Indexed	Commenting Indexed	AI enforced civility*
Facebook Comments		N/A
Disqus		N/A	**
Viafoura

*Prevents bad comments from impacting SEO
**Requires complex server integration

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that search engine algorithms are proprietary and dynamic, so the ways that site content and widgets can impact search ranking is always changing. That being said, Viafoura strikes a careful balance between maximizing loading speed, ensuring that Google and other search engines recognize your vibrant community, and ensuring that poor quality UGC is removed before it gets indexed. Combined, Viafoura’s tools can be a powerful contributor to your SEO strategy.

Tag: UGC