viafoura Archives

Viafoura Successfully Attains SOC 2 Type 2 Certification Following Completion of SOC Compliance Process

We’re thrilled to share an important milestone in our commitment to data security: the successful completion of our second annual SOC 2 Type 2 audit. This achievement not only reaffirms our dedication to safeguarding your data but also underscores our ongoing efforts to maintain the highest standards of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

While SOC 2 Type 1 provides a snapshot of our security measures at a specific moment, SOC 2 Type 2 goes further, assessing the effectiveness of these controls through our day-to-day operations.

“Our completion of the annual SOC 2 Type 2 audit underscores our unwavering commitment to safeguarding our users’ data,” asserts Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura. “It’s about more than compliance; it’s about instilling confidence in our users that their information is protected with the utmost diligence.”

Thank you for entrusting Viafoura with your digital engagement needs.

Sincerely,

The Viafoura Customer Experience Team.

5 Step Guide to Create a Safe Online Community

As Trust & Safety move to the forefront of legislative assemblies around the world [https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful-online-content.html] [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/a-guide-to-the-online-safety-bill], creating an online community that is a safe space for all is more important than ever. And with nearly 70% of audiences spending more than 15% of their time on-site reading posts and comments, you want to ensure your guidelines cover the comments most likely to drive the community away. But the challenge remains: how do you regulate countless unknown users that have access to your platform and make sure everyone plays by the same rules?

To help build your community, we’re giving you our 5-step guide to creating community guidelines that stick.

1. State the purpose

What’s the point? Why are we here? Why are you taking the time to ensure your audience has a safe space to engage? Because your audience is the most important part of your community, how they behave on your site directly impacts loyalty, retention, and revenue. When you start by defining your purpose, you can ensure that everything that follows contributes to it. Your mission statement for your community should connect with your company’s overall vision, state your goals, and clearly explain the type of community you hope to achieve.

2. Create the rules

The next step to creating a healthy online community is to define your site’s engagement rules: starting writing. Your guidelines should clearly spell out both acceptable and expected user behavior when using your platform and participating in your community. By explicitly stating the rules of engagement, you have a standard you can point to and enforce to remind users of expected behavior or remove toxic users who refuse to follow the rules. We’re here to give you some tips on preparing your own set of community guidelines.

While guidelines will vary across communities (and jurisdictions), there are some key elements that should be covered:

Personal attacks: how far is too far? Are certain people fair game? Are others off-limits?
Vulgar or obscene content: are you PG or R? In what context is “shit” ok? What about “bullshit”? (and yes, we have a “shitlist” workshop we use that can help with examples).
Libelous or defamatory statements
Anything described as threatening, abusive, pornographic, profane, indecent, or otherwise objectionable
Self-promotion, including links to blogs, 3rd party social, or crowdfunding sites

And remember that even though your focus should be the do’s and don’ts for your community, including the why can help build buy-in: Use your guidelines to outline the type of community you want to create so users can know how best to contribute.

3. Make it accessible

Once you’ve spent the time and effort to define your guidelines, it’s time to share them with the world! If you want your users to play by the rules, it’s essential they have a clear understanding of them. Typically, you’ll want to ensure the users receive your guidelines when registering. We recommend including your mission statement and a link to your guidelines and an FAQ page just above the conversation for easy reference. Having your guidelines live on a dedicated page of your site can also be helpful for internal reference and dealing with complaints, so make sure you’ve got them laid out in a way that’s easy to navigate – consider subheadings for each category outlined above, with specific examples where possible.

4. Enforce the Guidelines

Now comes the messy part – outlining the penalties for failing to follow the rules. This can be especially tricky, depending on your revenue model. Enforcing a zero-tolerance policy can be more difficult when dealing with paid subscribers than anonymous users. Still, it’s crucial that users know they are responsible and accountable for their behavior on your site. As a best practice, we recommend defining different severities of offenses and how they are handled – a low-level offense such as name-calling might earn a short ban with a message reminding the user of how to engage:

Other mid-level offenses, such as offensive usernames or repetitive self-promotion, might use a three-strike and you’re out system, whereas doxxing or libelous comments might have zero tolerance. Wherever you land, defining the consequences and even preparing the messaging will ensure that your team is ready to copy and paste and be consistent in their messaging and that users know the rules aren’t just for show.

5. Start Moderating

Finally, crafting your guidelines is the easy part. The backbone to enforcing your guidelines and building communities is your moderation team. Whether this will be their primary role or yet another hat they wear, you’ll need to ensure you have team members on hand to ensure your guidelines are applied in a timely and consistent manner. Whether you handle moderation in-house or outsource it to a 3rd party, all moderators should undergo specific training that reviews your guidelines and their practical application and instills the ability to identify and manage unconscious bias. This will provide a more holistic understanding of the guidelines, empowering moderators to apply them more objectively. While hiring moderators can get expensive if your community is very active or posts controversial topics, an automatic content moderation solution can help maximize your resources.

Final Word

While creating a safe community in an online world can be a daunting challenge, starting with these five simple steps can help set you on the path to success.

New Study Finds Publisher-Posted First Comment Steers Engaging Conversation

Audience engagement managers know that a healthy comment section is a core component to building a healthy online community. With contentious political debates happening with greater frequency and more people turning to the internet to vent frustration, maintaining a civil yet lively comment section has become more important than ever.

Thankfully, one simple technique can help publishers and moderators guide conversations with increased peace of mind. According to a new study from Viafoura, media outlets see a significant increase in traffic, civility and engagement when publishers post the first comment.

Posting the first comment has long been a technique used by social media managers and influencers in order to control the tone of the conversation and create engagement. The first comment operates as an ‘ice-breaker’ and helps set the standard for the conversation. It also invites responses from readers, which can increase time spent on site and enhance brand loyalty.

What happens when publishers post first?

The study took place between September 28th and December 15th 2021 in 15 newsrooms across Canada covering a diverse selection of geographical regions and various ends of the political spectrum. Each newsroom posted the first comment on a number of articles across their publications, within the first hour of the articles going live. This test group was then compared to a baseline group in order to provide context to the results.

One element of the study that differed from platform to platform was the type of comment posted beneath the article. Tactics varied from newsroom to newsroom. Some editors offered users assistance, responding to particular points in the article or answering questions. Others asked specific, directed, questions about readers’ response to the article. Writers had the freedom to bring their voice and creativity to the comment section!

Over the course of the study, Viafoura collected data on volume of comments, time spent commenting and conversion before and after engagement – three crucial metrics used to evaluate the success of an online community space.

Posting first means increased engagement, conversion & peace of mind

The study found that activity increased dramatically across all metrics, with a 45% increase in time in comments, 380% increase in total average comments and a 347% increase in average likes. This drastic increase indicates that controlling the first comment sets a tone and leads to more civil discourse.

With a standard set of behavior in place, moderation needs decreased. While the baseline group was required to flag 6.8% of posts and disable 9.1% of users, the test group saw significantly reduced numbers, with 4.8% flagged and 7.4% disabled. Simply by modeling good behavior, publishers reduced the number of community guideline violations and user bans.

Perhaps the most surprising result was the significant increase in registrations.

Previous research has shown that almost 50% of members end up removing themselves from a platform when exposed to trolling. In contrast, when publishers posted the first comment, each article saw a 55% increase in registrations, with a 9% increase in users who attempted to interact with commenting before signing up.

The positive impact didn’t stop at conversion. Viafoura also saw a 21% increase in users who interacted with commenting after signup. This indicates that users participated in the discourse, felt positive enough to register, and then continued to feel engaged and loyal past the point of conversion.

This data supports the notion that posting the first comment can be a significant step in reaching target conversion goals. When publishers interact directly with their community, they help maintain a sense of safety and attention that can lead to a direct increase in engagement.

What can we conclude?

Strong customer loyalty is essential for the wellness and longevity of any online brand. Simple moderation tricks can be the difference between a contentious online conversation and a thriving online community.

By setting the tone for conversation, publishers can direct content, invite polite discourse and even tailor their engagement to suit the needs and interests of their target audience. In each case, first comments have proven to be an essential step in the process of protecting and growing digital communities.

Why Comment Moderation Vendors Need to go Above and Beyond to Protect Their Partners

Media companies, like all brands, are looking to build recognition and trust by publishing user-generated content. However, publishing this content isn’t risk-free: organizations need to ensure that users aren’t publishing offensive or threatening posts on their websites or apps. This is where content moderation comes into the picture.

In today’s modern environment, organizations are doing everything possible to ensure that civility exists on their digital properties while, at the same time, promoting free speech and opinionated conversations. Many of them have implemented moderation solutions that use live moderators or run automated algorithms to solve this challenge.

The general population has also become aware of moderation — especially what it does and why it’s being used. So what happens when your moderation partner becomes more than another ordinary technology vendor?

Recently, a Viafoura customer and one of the largest publishers in the UK discovered why the Viafoura moderation team is so much more than a partner.

The publisher uses both the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Live Moderation solutions from Viafoura. As the AI solution learns and enforces the community guidelines set forth by the publisher, 85% to 90% of all comments are easily moderated by its AI engine. The remaining “questionable comments” are sent to a live moderator for a judgment call.

Earlier this year, one of those comments was sent to a live moderator at Viafoura. A user made a threat to a nursery in the commenting section, which of course was flagged and sent to the moderation queue.

Instead of just blocking the comment and banning the user, Viafoura’s moderation employee contacted the publisher’s team to explain the situation. The employees at the large publishing company immediately addressed the situation with local law enforcement.

In under half an hour of the comment being posted, the police took action.

Thanks to the quick thinking of Viafoura and the publisher’s employees, who went the extra mile, a potentially terrible situation was entirely avoided.

“Moderation is much more than a judgment call of ensuring user-generated content upholds platform-specific guidelines and rules to establish the suitability of the content for publishing,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation services at Viafoura. “Yes, we are all about maintaining our customers’ standards, but it’s also about recognizing when a comment has to be escalated. We pride ourselves on having staff that know what to do when — and go the extra mile to reach out to our customers — because we have the relationship to do that easily.”

SOC 2 Type 2 certification achieved, Viafoura completes the SOC compliance process

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

SOC 2 Type 1 is different from Type 2 in that a Type 1 assesses the design of security processes at a specific point in time, while a Type 2 report (also commonly written as “Type ii”) assesses how effective those controls are over time by observing operations for at least six months. Essentially, It examines a service provider’s internal controls and systems related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of data. Viafoura achieved Type 1 certification in September 2021 and now, with the Type 2 certification, has completed the full SOC compliance certification process.

“The completion of the SOC certification process is a significant milestone for Viafoura. The security, trust and compliance of our customers’ data is of the utmost importance” says Mark Zohar, President and COO of Viafoura. “With our SOC 2 Type 2 certification our customers can remain confident that we have streamlined our processes and designed everything around incident impact minimization.”

“Our mission as a company is to create civil and brand-safe online communities that engage and activate digital audiences. This mission cannot be achieved without a strong investment in and commitment to data security and compliance.”

Best Practices From A Data-Driven Audience Engagement Manager

Audience engagement managers have become a core component of publishing teams in newsrooms across the country. An audience engagement manager’s primary purpose is to manage how the audience evolves from casual readers to engaged members of the community.

To do that, they need the right audience engagement solution to moderate how people flow through the customer journey across your website. You want a platform that will encourage conversations to occur about your content so that people form an attachment to your brand and your community.

Brand attachment and affinity breeds customer loyalty. As an audience engagement manager, customer loyalty is one of the most important KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. Using the right audience engagement platform, you can leverage detailed audience profiles built upon first-party data insights to create the types of personalised content experiences that will help build that customer loyalty.

Know your target conversion rates

The aim of most publications is to increase the number of subscribers who willfully choose to consume and interact with your content. These companies use metrics like paywall stop rates to measure how many unique visitors are choosing to go beyond the paywall and become subscribers. A metre stop rate of 5 to 7 percent should be the target to measure effectiveness; if you’re performing above that threshold, you have a very active and engaged audience.

As the audience engagement manager, you also want to segment the types of people who are hitting your paywalls into different tiers of users. Start by creating segments for the one-time and passive visitors, which are people who interact with one to five pieces of content over the course of a month’s timeline.

Then there are the active users who regularly consume your content, perhaps on a daily basis. According to The Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a subsidiary of the Harvard Kennedy School research centre, approximately 9 percent of your users can be classified as active or regular readers of your content.

With those benchmarks in hand, an audience engagement manager can formulate strategies for how to meet or exceed those targets.

Identify the needs and interests of key demographics

As an audience engagement manager, you need to create content and communication strategies that speak the same language of your target audience. To do that, you need to develop deeper insights into what topics get their attention, how they’re likely to interact with different pieces of content and, perhaps most importantly, what is least likely to earn their attention and engagement.

One of the best ways to monitor that engagement is to use the right on-site metrics. As an audience engagement manager, you can use first-party data like page views, on-site engagement actions, time spent on pages, overall retention rates, and more insights to build rich audience profiles.

Those profiles will tell you more about what your readers are most interested in when interacting with content on your website. Using those insights, you can develop personal engagement tactics to grow the size of your audience base and guide more people to become those highly valued active consumers of your content.

What to look for in an audience engagement platform

So what is the type of solution best suited to help you create effective audience engagement strategies that help drive higher subscriptions and fuel growth for the business? Above all else, you need to know that the platform you integrate into your site can help you achieve your goals for the business.

Remember that sustainable audience growth is based on engagement and the valuable exchange of moments you have with your community. A beneficial audience engagement platform should help you acquire predictive analytics and data-driven insights to make logical decisions with your content, which will further enhance the value of your website experience.

Focus on how to drive up customer loyalty

For example, a strong audience engagement platform will improve engagement across your website. It can potentially increase conversion rates up to 25 times above existing site conversion rates.

Higher engagement and conversion rates is an excellent indicator of user lifetime value, which is indicative of strong customer loyalty among your users. Graham Media Inc. was one media company that sought to achieve this exact objective and, thanks to their partnership with Viafoura, they were able to boost user lifetime value by over 150 percent.

Final takeaways

Above all else, any audience engagement solution you implement should be provided by experts that can function as partners to your business rather than simple vendors. Your partner should be proactive by providing you with strategic recommendations on how best to gain those valuable insights from the platform. Once you have that first-party data on hand, you can focus on how to implement the takeaways and optimise your content to help drive direct impact on your business.

By leaning on insights gleaned from these platforms, audience engagement managers can spend more time on the big picture. You can focus more time coaching the rest of your publication team on how best to use these insights and improve engagement with audiences across all digital channels.

The Only Guide To Comment Moderation You Will Ever Need

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

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

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

The importance of comment moderation

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

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

Tips towards impactful comment moderation

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

Plan for uncivil content with your comment moderation policy

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

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

Ensure your team knows your policy

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

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

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

Enforce the comment moderation policy when necessary

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

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

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

Communicate and take breaks when necessary

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

How to Properly Target, Develop and Maintain Your Digital Audience

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

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

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

What exactly is digital audience development?

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

Establishing relationships

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

Getting more customers

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

Building customer loyalty

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

The difference between digital audience development and marketing

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

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

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

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

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

The key factors in digital audience development

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

Collaboration

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

Connection

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

Caring

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

Community

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

Takeaway

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

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

Effectively Using Microblogging to Cover Live Events

Most of us have come across a blog post at some point in our time on the Internet – you’re reading one right now! They’re a great way to share opinions, discuss topics, and express ourselves. With how easily accessible they are for both authors and readers, it’s no surprise that blogging is a popular and widespread function used by individuals and organizations alike. But most people overlook (or maybe aren’t even aware) of a subsection of blogging that’s gained massive traction over the past few years.

Microblogging has quickly expanded to become a popular option for sharing content across the digital landscape, and with good reason – it’s easy, effective, and allows people to engage in a shared space similar to blogs, but in much more manageable, time-efficient sections. As a result, more and more media companies have realized the benefit of microblogging, and are using it to engage with their audience within their own platforms.

An incredibly effective way to do so is by covering live events through frequent, rolling updates on their platform. Live events usually attract significant interest, so providing coverage can help you gain a good amount of attention and engagement. Read on to learn more about why using microblogging to cover live events could be a great option to drive community engagement, especially when supported with the right tools and functions.

What is microblogging?

This is probably the first question that some may want to ask. So what exactly makes microblogging different from regular blogging, and why does it make a difference?

In simple terms, microblogging is about creating shorter, more succinct content for audiences that can be consumed quickly. Compared to regular blogs, audience members will spend much less time on individual posts, so microbloggers usually make up for this by making more frequent updates to their pages so audiences can remain engaged.

Compared to blogs, microblogging involves much more picture and video content, which can be a great way to stimulate audiences without writing in detail. Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr are some great microblogging examples. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words!

Advantages of microblogging

Of course, microblogging has some definite advantages over the traditional blogging format, which is why advertisers, media outlets, and big businesses are jumping on the bandwagon. Here are some of the biggest reasons why microblogging is worth it.

Efficiency

Since microblogs are based around shorter, less detailed chunks of content, they take a lot less effort to produce big results. For example, you can prepare several microblog posts in the same amount of time it takes to write and put up a blog post of standard length. There’s clearly a tremendous amount of value to be derived from microblogging just from how easy it is to prepare content for the format.

Mobile-friendly

It’s official; more people spend their time browsing the Internet on mobile devices than on desktops or laptops. This means that if you’re looking to engage an audience, your content needs to be mobile-friendly. Blogs can be a chore to read through on mobile devices, and scrolling through walls of text is just as appealing as you’d expect (it isn’t).

This is where microblogging and its focus on visual content shine – your audience will happily view videos and interact with exciting photos, since they translate much better onto mobile platforms. In addition, the shorter content segments often mean that you can prepare posts that can be taken in with little to no scrolling at all, which is great for the quick, concise updates that are standard during live event coverage.

Flexibility

Since your content is produced in smaller, more frequent intervals, microblogging allows you to change the subject and direction of your content on the fly. This is a lot easier on your content producers since each post usually takes minutes to conceptualize and write out. In addition, covering new developments, reacting to events, and responding to audience interests are effortless on a microblogging website.

Covering events through microblogging

We’ve gone over the benefits of microblogging, and its clear that the time-limited and fast-paced nature of live events make it very hard to cover them effectively through regular blogs. Microblogging is clearly the way to go, and some of our readers may already have theirs up and running. However, some important steps need to be followed if you want to effectively do live coverage and drive engagement. Here are some of the best tips to make your next event coverage session a huge success.

Prepare and confirm functionality

Before the event starts, you’ll want to make sure that your platform doesn’t have any outstanding issues or bugs that might end up being a problem during the live coverage. Finding and sorting these problems out beforehand will save you a lot of trouble down the line and make your live microblogging coverage a much smoother experience.

Take pictures

The strength of microblogging stems from the added engagement driven by graphic content. While it’s acceptable to provide only text based post updates on your feed, you’ll find it much easier to break up the monotony of your text wall with photos or images of the event itself. If the event is live, consider having someone attend and take pictures. If you’re covering a streamed event, take screenshots of memorable moments and pair them with your text posts for great effect.

Talk to your audience

Your audience will be having conversations based on the event; you should join in as well! Have someone ready to reply to comments, like popular opinions, and generally promote discussion. Not only will you spark added activity and continue to drive engagement, but you’ll be able to show that your platform is involved within the community and cares about what the audience has to say.

Be ready to moderate

Not all discussion around microblogging coverage will be healthy. Plenty of trolls and toxic individuals will likely attend the event, more than happy to spread negativity, toxic thinking, and outright inappropriate content. If using automatic moderation, make sure your algorithms are working as intended, and it’s highly recommended you use live moderators to cover all the bases and put out fires as they start.

Endnote

When done right, microblogging to cover live events can help media platforms boost their reputation as a trusted source of information and discussion. But using the right tools and taking the proper steps to prepare for your coverage is just as important. Our solutions suite offer several practical and highly effective tools that can be used to enhance your next live event blog. If you’re interested in learning more about what we can do for you, contact us today to schedule a demo, and elevate your next live blog event from good to extraordinary.