the npr social media desk

On October 30, 2013, we started the Social Media Desk Tumblr as a place to “talk about the work we do … our projects, our experiments, our brainstorms, our successes and failures.”

Today we’re moving over to Medium and changing the name of our blog to Curios. We’ll keep you up to date there on what we’re doing and thinking, just like we did across 439 posts here on Tumblr.

Speaking of Tumblr, we still love it! We have some great Tumblrs for you to follow, including: the NPR Tumblr for news, Skunkbear for entertaining dives into the world of science and the NPR Illustration Tumblr for another look at how we work here at the mothership.

What’s your alternate online publishing plan if your site goes down? On Friday, Oct. 21, The New York Times and The Verge faced this issue, as hackers attacked a major Internet infrastructure company. With the audience in mind, NPR’s digital editors turned to Facebook Notes to reach folks who otherwise might have been unable to see the story. With election night right around the corner, this might be something you’d want to consider if you run into technical issues with your own website(s).

A number of Nippers (what we call NPR employees) were confused when they saw this in their Facebook feeds, so we thought we’d explain.

— Lori Todd, social media editor

From Joe Ruiz, weekend digital editor:

That evening, prompted by one of my favorite news organizations (Vox Media), I suggested to our tech reporter, Alina Selyukh, and my fellow engagement team editor, Dana Farrington, that we use Facebook Notes to publish Alina's ongoing story about the day's internet disruption.

The thinking behind The Verge's post of their story on Facebook, it appears, was to reach users where they are, especially if they were affected by the outage and had limited access to news.

On my desk, I keep a printed slide from a presentation created by a close friend and academic studying news. It's of Isaac Lee, chief news officer at Univision, from a speech he gave at the International Symposium of Online Journalism a few years back. It reads: "If we are not prepared to go and search for the audience wherever they live, we will lose."

To me, at the very least, that means we can't expect our audience to seek us where we THINK they want to find us. We need to go to them.

By posting Alina's story on Facebook Notes, we weren't going to drive any traffic to NPR.org, NPR One (our audio listening app that’s tailored for you) , or our news app, but we tell an important story to an audience who likely wanted to know more from our reporter in a place they already were. The engagement we normally measure on Facebook wasn't outstanding, but the audience who did read it were likely served by work we'd done. We simply needed to present it in a place where they already were, and for that, I hand it over to Dana.

From Dana Farrington, NPR engagement editor:

First, I had to be reminded that Facebook Notes even existed. Looking at our page’s archive, we have quite a few Notes from 2008, and exactly zero since then. But last year, Facebook upgraded this feature to make Notes “more beautiful and customizable.” Overall, the presentation was cleaner than a status update and allows for much more flexibility.

For Alina’s story, I copied and pasted directly from our content management system, and only had to make a few style tweaks. The tool allowed for hyperlinks and special formatting for setting off longer quotes. The hard part is manually updating any changes made to the story on NPR.org.

If we were to use this again, we’d want to consider the following things: How do we indicate that a post has been updated? What issues are there with image rights? (You can put an image across the top of the Note, but unlike a Link post, the image is stored on Facebook’s servers.)

By Claire O’Neill

Live video is nothing new to the web, but it’s become a real thing for news orgs lately. That’s no doubt the result of Facebook’s incentivization — but it’s also because tech has generally made it more available to more of us, and in some ways more preferable than ever.

Take the Olympics. While TV viewership for NBC was down this year from 2012, Variety reports: “Ten percent of NBCU’s ad revenue for Rio came from digital” and “viewers streamed more than 2.71 billion minutes of coverage” -- and much of that was live.  

That’s to say: Facebook is by no means the only platform for live-streaming media. But NPR has had the opportunity to experiment heavily there specifically, so we want to share what we’ve tried and learned -- in two main parts: Some of our creative/editorial approaches and some of the most salient analytics. We’ll be sharing a secondary post with some technical basics later.

EDITORIAL APPROACHES

Over the course of about 5 months, we’ve produced upwards of 425 live videos. For us, that’s 0 to 60 in no time. We’ve been able to quickly staff up a team of talented visual journalists, test lots of gear and play with various formats and approaches.

We’re all still figuring out what works, and sometimes intuition is wrong. So our philosophy has been: Let’s get weird. Just do it and then decide if it works. You might intuitively think that video of a radio newscast would be really boring, for example. But people have really seemed to enjoy seeing Korva Coleman in the morning! We’ll soon be piloting an evening newscast from NPR West.

We’ve tried lots of stuff that defies category -- like playing with a blue screen, staging a worm race, incorporating practical effects like a 3-D printed NPR logo made by the D.C. Public Library, etc. But the majority of our videos fall into three buckets:

1. Building on newsroom strengths:

At NPR, our strengths lie in the talents and knowledge of our reporters; the success of existing shows and brands; and our news-gathering capacity.

The newscast in video form

TV-style streams, e.g. the conventions with PBS

News conversations and interviews, e.g.. video extensions of existing podcast brands, like a Code Switch-hosted discussion of Colin Kaepernick

2. Filing from the field:

We’ve also tried to encourage our reporters to see this as one more tool for delivering news to both their devoted followers and potentially new ones on the web. This is something we’d like to do more frequently, but we routinely run into connectivity issues remotely in the field.

Standups during breaking news, like Ari Shapiro’s dispatch from Baton Rouge on his personal Facebook page

A daily, hosted morning news show, which we call Cereal

Behind-the-scenes tours, like Sam Sanders at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

3. Making the most of the medium:

We’ll never top the exploding watermelon or Clickhole’s brilliant “Let’s Kiss." But we have created shows, series and one-offs that exist solely for this medium:

Performances like “Night Owl,” our late-night music series

Slow tv-esque streams: “Mesmerizing things” like jellyfish at the National Aquarium or an art installation in LA

Interactive games like a spin-off show called “Initialisms” with NPR’s Ask Me Another crew

Science experiments … or “eggsperiments”

Field trips like Skunkbear at the Smithsonian

Conversations that revolve around a sense of community or shared experience, like how we mourned the death of Prince 

Thinking ahead...

Because the shelf-life of a live video is short — and also because our edited/produced video generally performs better — we’re experimenting with approaches that allow us to repurpose the content.

Invisibilia podcast premiere with a live performance by shadow puppeteers Manual Cinema, which we repurposed and republished

“Let’s Talk” explainer series, which we want to condense and republish

“Night Owl” performances, which we plan to republish on YouTube

(HT to the village it’s taken, which I’m merely representing in writing this post: Lori Todd, Mito Habe-Evans, Kara Frame, Maia Stern, CJ Riculan, Becky Harlan, Becky Lettenberger, Nick Michael, Colin Marshall, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Nickolai Hammar)

ANALYTICS

Audio: The most stunning realization for us as an audio network is that live video on Facebook is effectively a return to silent film. About 17 percent of our live video views have the sound on. Another way of putting it: This is a highly visual medium, which obviously raises the bar for visual interestingness. We don’t have a surefire solution but we know it’s not talking heads.

Targeting: So far, the most successful videos we’ve produced have been tied to breaking news or a current event — like the national conventions. Could be that Facebook favors that content; could be that our viewers do. The ultimate challenge is getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Will the people who are interested in art and museums be online at the moment we go live with a sneak peek tour? Odds are: No. So one thing we’ve been thinking about is how to maximize the shelf-life and repurpose-ability of the videos we produce.

Interaction: Ultimately, what you really want are shares, comments and “reactions” — i.e. the emojis available to viewers as they watch — because those are indicators of stories that resonate specifically in this medium.

Retention: Generally, to gauge the success of a video, you can ignore the prominent “reach” metric, which is just trying to seduce you with its size. Reach is tantamount to the effect of an LA billboard as commuters speed past it: The video appeared in your feed, but it may have never really registered.

With that in mind, it’s somewhat arbitrary, but we’ve decided that the 30-second view is what counts. About 13 percent of all views for us last 30 seconds or longer. In other words: It’s easy for Facebook to push the video out, but it’s hard to get drivers to stop and look at the billboard — and even harder to keep them parked. We’ve found that these videos are more successful among our existing fans, but are not necessarily expanding that group in a significant way.

Dearth of data: Facebook can be opaque about other key analytics. While we do know that 13 percent of all viewers watch at least 30 seconds, we do NOT know how much of any given video was completed by someone who started at minute 1 vs. minute 14. Which leaves you, as a producer, obsessing over the interestingness of just about every second in the video. We also don’t know how we’re faring vis-a-vis other news orgs.

Success? So what makes a “successful” live video? Hard to say. As our metrics analyst Dan Frohlich put it: Could be some combination of “video conversions” -- from impressions to views; could be engagement (shares, likes, etc); could be the end result of how many 30-second views a video got; or some combo. 

(HT to Dan who did all the real work with these numbers.)

TL;DR

We’re only a few months in, but the education has been real. Organizationally, this experiment has gotten more folks in the newsroom thinking seriously about visual journalism -- and understanding the challenges of producing it on the fly. As a team we’ve been able to quickly improvise, try new things and drop other things when they’re not working. 

Ultimately, live coverage is one of the many storytelling forms that we want to be comfortable with and prepared to do. In the coming months we plan to take what we’ve learned in this space and apply some of it more broadly to our evolving video strategy, so stay tuned. 

Did I forget something? Am I wrong about something? Do you have burning questions about XLR cables and shotgun mics? You know what to do: @oneillclaire 

By Joey Weed and Brandon Carter

The summer interns for both the Social Media Desk and Audience Insights have departed. Their parting gift was this analysis. -- Wright

Almost every weekday since May, NPR has published a Facebook Live feature called Cereal. Hosted by NPR’s Two-Way bloggers, each episode covers the morning’s top headlines and then takes a deep-dive into the most interesting story of the day. Now more than three months into this experiment, how’s it doing?

We focused our analysis on how viewers watched Cereal in their news feeds, how well each episode retained viewers and how the series has been performing over time.

We looked at 54 episodes, running from May through July. The data gathered from Facebook Insights allowed us to look at video views for 3 seconds (Total Views), 10 seconds and 30 seconds. Facebook also measures how many people are watching an episode – whether it’s autoplaying in their newsfeed or whether they clicked directly on the video. Finally, we can see how many viewers were watching at particular spots during each live broadcast to better understand retention.

How has Cereal been doing over time?

At the start of the series, we saw a higher number of negative interactions with the audience. We measured these by adding up the negative signals for each video (hiding the video, hiding all videos from the NPR page or un-liking the NPR page) and dividing that number by post impressions. This new variable allowed us to compare the frequency of negative interactions for videos with varying degrees of impressions.

The negative interaction trend we observed suggests that NPR’s Facebook audience is becoming more accustomed to seeing Cereal in their news feeds, or that they are no longer seeing the notifications that bothered them in the first place. As both negative interactions and 30-second views level off, we believe Cereal has settled into a more-or-less consistent audience pattern.

Are viewers watching Cereal with sound?

We found that 35% of views are played with sound during a typical episode. We saw a moderate correlation between videos accompanied by shorter text descriptions and increases in views with the sound turned on. This insight reveals that the video description could have an impact on how people engage with the video.

How long is our audience watching Cereal?

The average Cereal viewer watches approximately 30 seconds of any single episode. This number has remained stable from month to month.

While average time spent watching Cereal videos has remained constant over time, the average length of our episodes increased from 17 minutes in May to 22 minutes in July. The result is that the average user is seeing a smaller percentage of the overall video (see chart below).

Future areas for analysis.

Two areas we’d like to look at in the future are the performance of breaking news and the performance of streams with visual aids or props. Initial analysis shows that segments with more to look at can boost retention compared to verbal descriptions of complex topics.

Cereal episodes have seen better retention when the breaking news topic is covered for the entire episode. Episodes that included other topics along with the breaking news of the moment did not fare as well.

As the samples sizes are small, we’ll reserve these topics for future analysis as the data set grows.

- Joey

Editorial takeaways from Brandon Carter:

Video description text matters. Our analysis shows that there’s some correlation between shorter descriptions and an increased number of views with the sound on. This finding highlights the importance the video description field for Facebook Live videos. Like the lead of a story, the most important names and information should appear at the beginning of the description. We should keep that text short, sweet and to the point. This will quickly inform viewers of what they’ll see and, hopefully, win their interest.

Video length: Shorter can be better. The average length of Cereal episodes has increased over time, while the amount of time the average viewer spends watching Cereal has stayed the same. We want our viewers to watch more of each episode. One strategy for increasing this number could be the shortening of episodes in conjunction with a greater focus on deep dives. 

Trusting our news judgement is key. Although we don’t have enough data for a firm conclusion, breaking news seems to bring spikes in viewership and viewer retention. While breaking news doesn’t happen every day, we should continue to embrace “news of the now” for the same reason. A great example of this was our August 3 episode, in which Two-Way blogger Eyder Peralta chatted with politics editor Domenico Montanaro about Donald Trump. While none of the topics discussed were big enough news to be considered “breaking,” the overall conversation was fully on the news. We’ll have to watch the numbers to see if they confirm our hunch that both “being on the news” and “breaking news” bring in and retain audience.

Keep it visual. Our analysis suggested that episodes with additional visual element -- Skype calls, diagrams, maps, etc. -- may increase retention. We think it would make sense for our producers to work alongside the Two-Way team to bring a greater diversity of visual elements to each episode.

By Dan Frohlich

Earlier this year Facebook launched Audience Optimization with the idea that publishers would be able to better engage with niche communities. Here at NPR we jumped on the idea almost immediately and started using preferred audience tags on the vast majority of our Facebook posts. (I also refer to this system as audience targeting). We recently reviewed the metrics on our link posts to see how adding preferred audiences impacted both reach and engagement.

For this analysis, we looked at 2,573 total link posts from March – May 2016. We used a difference-of-medians test to measure significance (noted on graphs with green/red arrows). Over this period, nearly 70% of our posts had at least one audience target applied to the post and a typical post with audience targeting had 5 different preferred audience tags applied.

First we looked at reach (the number of people who saw the post) and impressions (the total number of times a post was seen). Based on things Facebook has said publicly about their own internal testing, we didn’t expect these posts to reach more (or fewer) people. Our analysis, however, found that significantly more people were reached (and more impressions were received) for posts that had at least one preferred audience specified. We also looked at posts with more preferred audiences tags and found some significant differences there as well.

Looking at click-through rate we found that posts with at least one audience target performed worse than posts with no audience targets. This was particularly true for posts that had four to six preferred audiences.

Despite the lower click-through rate for posts with preferred audiences, we found that the increased reach and impressions these post received more than made up for the shortfall in our click-through rate. This is to say, a smaller percentage of the people seeing a post may have been clicking on it but, in aggregate, our total number of click throughs to NPR.org from Facebook was larger due to the increased reach and impressions. This was true for posts with relatively few targets (1-3) and for posts with many preferred audience tags applied (7 or more).

During our analysis we also found that posts with preferred audiences tend to receive fewer shares and likes per impression. We didn’t find a measurable difference in comments per impression.

These results are the opposite of what we expected to see given that the intent wasn’t for these posts to reach more people, just the right people who would be more likely to interact with our content (by clicking through to the article or liking/sharing/commenting).

None of this means we’re using these preferred audiences optimally. Our editors tend to rack their brains trying to think of the right audiences to add for each post. But it’s possible we’re just not always making the right choices when choosing audience tags. It’s possible that we’re sometimes too broad or too narrow in our preferred audience selections. We haven’t done a thorough-enough review to rule those things out. It’s also true that we may be picking the right preferred audience tags for most posts but not all. We already know that picking preferred audience tags for politics content is a lot easier than trying to pick one for a more obscure topic.

For more tips on preferred audiences, feel free to check out this guidance from Facebook.

EDITOR’S VIEW: Our engagement editors asked for this analysis because they had a hunch that preferred audience tags were hurting our reach. Based on Dan’s findings, however, we can see that they are a net benefit. Our next move will be to consistently apply 1-3 audience tags to all posts. We’re focusing on 1-3 tags per post because Dan’s analysis suggests this is the sweet spot in terms of click-through rate, reach and impressions. We plan to follow Facebook’s suggested spread of broad tags followed by less-broad tags followed by specific tags. An example might be: politics --> Republicans --> Lindsey Graham. After we standardize our tagging around this approach, we will circle back for another analysis over another 3-month period.

By Steve Mullis and Wright Bryan

Note: Over the years, the @NPR Twitter account has mostly been a headlines feed, occasionally a hosted feed and, more recently, often a semi-hosted feed. The following document outlines our internal guidance for hosting the feed.

Hosting Twitter is like spinning out a monologue on the news. What are we reporting? What are people talking about? What do we know? What do we want to know? On our feed, we want to serve our community with a steady stream of information about the day’s big news, the stories that catch our eye and the memes that are rippling across the Internet.

Our values are curiosity, humanity, community, accuracy and transparency. At NPR, we are committed to being a source for facts and smart questions. We know that we don’t know everything and that is part of our identity. But, really, how should you handle the account when you’re on duty? Here’s our guidance:

Voice: Our voice is authoritative and smart. But it can also be fun and self aware. Talk with our audience, don’t talk AT our audience.

Tell Stories: Look at your top-performing (or even low-performing) stories and identify opportunities to tell those stories to your Twitter audience. Assume people might not click on the link. Use images in the story, quotes or fact lists to add context. Make it shareable. Try a tweetstorm of a story (here’s a simple definition) to tell it in a stream of short bites. Reply to yourself with each tweet to create a series of threaded tweets (don’t forget to remove the @npr [handle] in each reply).

Take advantage of trending topics and hashtags: Check which terms are trending on Google Trends and what hashtags on Twitter.com are making the rounds. If any of your stories match trending words or hashtags, use them in tweets. Tweet a story again if need be. Come at it from a different angle or highlight a part that people are talking about on Twitter. But NEVER try and hijack a popular hashtag by just plopping it at the end of an unrelated story. It is obvious and looks bad.

Report the news: If there is a piece of news worth getting out immediately, tweet it! Let people know we will have more details later, but get the facts we know out there now!! Tweet again (you can respond to previous tweets) when we have a story link. Use photos, NPR’s quotable tool and our fact-list tool (examples below) to add context. They’re a great way to get out a lot of info in a tweet.

Retweet: Look for opportunities to retweet NPR reporters, other NPR accounts, official sources and member-station reporters. Remember that RT’ing IS reporting. Verify information before re-tweeting it; make sure tweets meet our standards (Twitterbugged images, etc.) Our preference, more often than not, is to use a QUOTE TWEET to add context and additional information.

Retweeting member stations: We want to highlight the reporting strength of our member-station network through retweets. But keep in mind that we have a national audience. If the story is worth sharing but is unfamiliar to the broader audience, use a quote tweet and to add the context required for it to be of interest to all.

Retweeting reporters & employees: Be considerate of those you RT or tag in tweets. While there is the expectation that all our tweets are public -- whether by a reporter, editor, producer or other NPR employee -- be mindful of those in the building who are not directly in the public eye and likely are not expecting their tweet to go out to NPR’s Twitter audience. Stick to those covering the news or talking specifically about news they have direct knowledge about. Don’t RT someone’s snarky comment on a debate, for instance, just because we are also following and reporting on the debate.

Engage: Check our most recent tweets and see how people are responding. Respond if there are conversations worth having or questions you can easily answer. A little goes a long way, so even saying “Thanks!” to someone or liking a tweet can have an impact. As in the example below, if you see an opportunity to engage using some personal insight into a particular topic, do it! People love that connection that tells them that you aren’t a robot. The response is a joke that involves a little knowledge of Nic Cage’s mythical status among the Reddit community, and now this NPR fan just had a great interaction with us. 

Also, there are often times where we might receive inflammatory tweets or tweets that call our reporting into question. One of the most common forms is, “NPR, why aren’t you reporting on X.” Truth is, we often are but they just haven’t seen it. When possible, send a link. For other negative tweets, generally the best response is no response. But there will be times where you would want to correct false information or point someone in the direction of other NPR reporting. Correct without being condescending, without attacking and without losing the voice and composure our audience expects from NPR. 

Dealing with errors: Errors are inevitable and correcting them when we notice one, whether factual or just a typo, is paramount to maintaining trust with our audience. If you notice a mistake in a tweet, fix it immediately. One of the best methods is to quote tweet the original with the correction (following our standard corrections guidelines), and then re-write the tweet as intended and tweet again. If the error was in a factlist or quotable, re-create it with the corrected information. If a follower pointed out the error, reply to and thank them and point them to the correction if possible. Unless there are legal or safety concerns, never delete tweets because of an error or typo.

More Social Sandbox Twitter Tip Sheets:

Results from our 2014 Twitter hosting experiment

Twitter basics for journalists, part 1

Twitter basics for journalists, part 2

Other Tips:

Thinking about mobile: Mobile is where a lot of people experience Twitter. When you tweet text and a link (like our auto-tweets), they show up like the example seen below on the left. As you can see, because of the auto-populating Twitter card with the image, you get the headline twice. So if you were manually tweeting this, you might use a Twitterbugged image and make the headline a sentence-case tweet. OR … just write a tweet that pairs with the headline and include the link only (so it pulls in the Twittercard), like the example on the right. DON’T write a tweet that is also the headline, but then ONLY include the link -- otherwise you will get a tweet that repeats itself. Be as human as possible. 

Hey y’all! I’m Brandon, and I’m the summer intern on the Social Media Desk!

I’m here in DC via My Old Kentucky Home where I study advertising at Western Kentucky University. I’m not much of a Don Draper, though, as my background is all in journalism. I’ve held several staff and editorial roles at both of WKU’s student publications and am heading into my second semester as editor-in-chief of the College Heights Herald in the fall – shout out to all the #collegemedia folks out there!

Social media has always been a big part of my life. I’ve been glued to various social networks since I was a wee middle school student and have spent far too much time scrolling through Twitter since I joined in 2008. I’m particularly interested in the innovative ways news organizations are presenting their content to readers and viewers in the ever-changing social landscape.

Outside of the journalism world, I’m a huge Broadway nerd and I’ve seen every episode of The Office at least 12 times. I’m also a big sports fan and will gladly gush about St. Louis Cardinals baseball to anyone who’s interested, or not.

I’m on Twitter @brandonetc, so please feel free to reach out to me and chat about sitcoms, Snapchat or sweets (seriously – I love any and all desserts).

Every year, tens of thousands of technology, film and music junkies convene in Austin for 10 days of mayhem, attending panels by day, and consuming free drinks, food and music by night. Over the years, the Interactive portion of SXSW has grown to include a large selection of digital media panels and discussions. This is how I chose to spend most of my days in Austin, between 🌮 tacos🌮  and meeting Grumpy Cat.  For digital editors and publishers, the headlines weren’t too surprising and many of them reinforce our current thinking:

VR Everywhere: NYT, Washington Post were both showing off their VR experiences. Many of those panels were standing-room only. It was also great to see a focus on storytelling and VR - not just by journalists, but also by the film industry. VR is finally reaching the masses, first through Google Cardboard, and now through early consumer-ready headsets. The widest-reaching examples are Samsung’s Gear VR (powered by Oculus, $150), Playstation VR ($399, available in October), Oculus Rift (starting at $599) and HTC Vive (starting at $799, available April 5).

There’s No Way Around Distributed Content. Being on a platform (social or search) is not enough. Our entire organization has to embrace this new reality, not just the outer corners of newsrooms. Let’s ask ourselves: Is it time to breakup with the homepage? Are we taking full advantage of Instant Articles?

Page Views No Longer King. Lots of talk about metrics beyond page views. Engagement metrics on each platform are much more valuable, though still a struggle to monetize. Have you defined what your platform-specific KPIs are?

Digital Staffing is Key. Many national publishers (digital-only and traditional media) have robust teams working on social platforms (not just distribution, but also discovery and reporting/storytelling on these platforms.) Additionally, publishers adding more devs/engineers. 

Let’s Stop Writing About Millennials. You probably saw NYT’s “What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?” over the weekend, and the huge reaction to it. Refinery29’s CEO/Founder had some great advice on how to engage future audiences and the power of niches. 

Feel free to dig into my unabridged notes for more great stuff:

Creating the Modern Media Company w/ Vox CEO Jim Banff

Lerer’s Theory of Media Evolution w/ Ben Lerer of Thrillist

Let’s Drop the Term Millennial w/ Refinery29 CEO Phillipe Von Borries

Making Distributed Content Work in News

Newsapalypse: Can Digital Really Sustain Media?

Project Loxodo: Can Tech Drive Reader Engagement? w/ Washington Post’s Marty Baron and Shaliesh Prakash

Why GIFs? w/ GIPHY CEO Alex Chung

Future of Entertainment: Ira Glass

The 170 Year Old Startup: The AP

A while back, we ran an analysis on our posts to Facebook and concluded that the platform was largely time independent in terms of whether a post succeeded. A post at 4 AM on Saturday should be just as likely to find an audience as one at 10 AM on Tuesday. Despite a solid statistical analysis, our editors found this data hard to swallow. So Dan Frohlich, our metrics analyst for digital, circled back to this question for us. His findings are below. They’re inconclusive but do seem to point us in a new direction. I’ll follow up with my own thoughts after his analysis. – Wright

Our audience engagement team has routinely had questions about whether publish time on Facebook impacts the performance of a story. Up until now, we’ve relied a lot on the graph of when our fans are online in Facebook Insights – something we refer to as the “Facebook whale.” But because we know our users see older content in their feed hours or even days after it was originally posted, we wondered, does it actually matter if something is published during a time when fewer Facebook users are online? That’s the question we set out to answer.

I want to stress upfront that this is not an experiment, it’s simply observational data based on posts we published over a 6 month period. I’ll explain more on why that matters later on.

Firsts things first, when do we publish content on Facebook?

I looked at the performance of 4,085 NPR link posts (excluding station links, video posts, etc.) from August 2015 through the first week of February 2016. The first thing I noticed is that we already publish most of our Facebook content during the daylight hours, peaking around noon (see graph below). This is also very similar across weekday and weekend. All times in this note are Eastern. 

Hour-by-hour, which hours perform best?

First I wanted to see how each hour of the day compares to the overall average of the 4,000+ posts. I looked at 4 different metrics: total reach (the number of people who saw a post), the total number of impressions (how many times a post was seen, including multiple views by one person), the number of link clicks (people clicking on a link back to npr.org), and the number of post consumers (people who interacted with the post in any direct way). The following table summarizes the results. A “No” means there wasn’t a statistically significant difference (at 95% confidence) between the overall average and how posts from a particular hour performed. All of the other time periods are marked on whether they were significantly higher or lower than the overall average.

Only one hour (7 AM) performed significantly above the overall average across all 4 metrics (meaning those posts had more link clicks, reached more people, and received more impressions/consumers). 10AM led to posts receiving significantly more people and garnering more impressions. 5 PM led only to significantly more impressions. Posts published at 3 AM reached fewer people and had fewer impressions and posts at 8 PM had significantly lower scores on reach, impressions, and consumers.

This didn’t definitively answer the question of posting things on peak vs. off-peak hours. So … 

Comparing 7PM-6AM to 7AM-6PM

For the next part of the analysis I compared posts published between 7PM-6AM (off-peak) to posts published between 7AM-6PM (peak). I found significant differences across all four metrics. Posts published during peak hours (7AM-6PM) reached more people and received more impressions/link clicks/consumers per post. The table below shows the averages for the combination of each metric & time period.

However, since this wasn’t a true experiment, there are some things we should consider first before we declare peak-hour posting to be more valuable.

What this data does & doesn’t tell us

One major complicating factor is how our editorial decision making has been impacted by the belief that publishing time does matter. For example, if we approach Facebook thinking we should maximize the traffic to our “best” content and we believe one of the ways we do this is by publishing that content during peak hours, we’re effectively creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Peak hours => publish “best” content => best     results

Off-peak hours => publish everything else =>     worse results

 So naturally it wouldn’t be a surprise that the hours that perform best in an analysis like this are the peak-traffic hours (if you assume that the quality of the content is more important than publish time). A true experiment would require us to roll a die or flip a coin to determine when we publish content (randomizing when our “best” content gets published). That would help control for our editorial judgment coming into play and we could more definitively answer this question. (We do not plan on actually running this experiment.)

There’s also the question of breaking news. My gut tells me that U.S. breaking news is more likely to happen during peak hours, simply because that’s usually when people are working (for example, a politician is less likely to make an attention grabbing statement at 3 AM than 9 AM).

Open Questions 

Are we manufacturing this result by publishing our     “best content” during peak hours?

Even if peak hours (7AM – 6PM) are better for     publishing Facebook posts, do we want to publish more during periods that     already include more posts?

What metric are we trying to optimize for? Historically     we’ve put less weight on reach and more weight on consumers and link     clicks. This data suggests that publish time may impact some metrics more than     others.

-- Dan

The message I take from this analysis is that we should post more often from midnight to 8 AM. Publishing our best material in the heart of the East Coast business day is either helping us or not hurting us. But neglecting the wee hours of the clock is a missed opportunity for stories that deserve an audience but are losing out in the competition for daytime slots. We are still reaching lots of people when we post after midnight. So my recommendation will be to add a few more posts so that we’re publishing into the feed at maximum intervals of 60 minutes.

This morning Facebook officially rolled out Reactions to users worldwide, allowing users to choose between “Like” and five emotions: love, haha, wow, sad and angry. According to the non-scientific polling of our NPR's Facebook fans, users seem to like it. 

(Hat tip to Steve Mullis on that Facebook language!)

Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey, one of the social media desk’s favorite Internet culture writers, raises questions about the actual reactions themselves: "When is it appropriate to “like” vs “love”? When is the “wow” face just … kinda rude?” Dewey shares some suggested rules on how to use Reactions appropriately over at The Intersect. 

As a Facebook page owner, I’m interested to see how Facebook Reactions impact the performance of posts. Will Reactions impact click-through? (I’m skeptical, but if users have more things to click on, are they less likely to click the content itself?) How does the algorithm weigh different emotions? Will an overwhelming number of “negative” emotions like sad or angry limit a posts reach, even if the content itself is of high news value or a great story worth sharing? (Think StoryCorps! All the stories that make us cry … They’re great stories, but will the Facebook algorithm interpret our Reactions negatively?)

There are a lot of unknowns here, but I’m interested to see how it will play out. We’ll let you know when we learn more. 

So, you want to do a social media callout. GREAT! Now what? Here’s a helpful guide to help you craft a callout, including tips on making a social callout a success. 

5 Steps for Social Media Callouts

"Every callout essentially has five steps," writes Serri Graslie:

Hone the question and pick your platforms.

Write the pitch

Share it

Review the responses; contact and vet participants

Write the story; think about how to maximize responses on air and online

If you’ve never done a callout before, be sure to read Serri’s post as it explains the five steps and includes six ways you could use callouts (finding a source, crowdsourcing images, finding story ideas, gather personal stories or ideas, starting a discussion and having fun).

Tips for Successful Callouts

Communicate with the social media team early. Every newsroom has it’s own workflow for handling social media. Because each social platform has it's own advantages and limitations, a social media editor can advise you if your callout needs to be tweaked or if there’s a better-suited option. Turn-around time on callouts can vary depending on whether the callout resonates with the audience and what you’re asking the audience to do.

Results may vary. The success of a callout will depend on whether or not the audience finds it interesting and worth sharing or commenting on. A successful callout will be focused and direct, but should be written in a way that entices the audience to respond. Be prepared in case your callout underperforms.

Facebook and Twitter are not the only options.  There are other social networks like Reddit and Snapchat that you may be able to tap.

Verification is important. In the case of callouts, you should verify a source’s identity and information as you would when reporting in traditional manners

Don’t forget to follow up with the audience. Social media is a two-way conversation between us and the audience. If we are asking them to do something for us, whether that’s commenting on a post, emailing us, or (especially) recording audio, we must make an effort to acknowledge their participation. 

Related posts about callouts and crowdsourcing

Six ways to crowdsource: Tow Center’s Guide to Crowdsourcing

How to Crowdsource for Ambient Sounds

How to successfully solicit and use audio callouts

6 Ways To Use Social Callouts

This is Vesta Partovi’s valedictory post for the SMD Tumblr. We’ve had a string of standout interns and Vesta continued that tradition, bringing passion, intelligence and humor to our little operation. Thanks Vesta! -- Wright

Has your Snapchat game evolved? Ours has.

Ever since it launched in 2011, the app has been evolving in unexpected ways. For media organizations like us, it’s been a twisty, turny ride. Recently, I was asked to do brownbag presentation at NPR about my storytelling approach on Snapchat. Here’s what I’ve learned over the last four months!

Before I dive into our current process, though, I think it’s important to talk about how Snapchat itself has evolved. In the beginning, it was just a 1) communication tool. I Snapped you (text, photo, photo + text). You Snapped me back. There was maybe a video Snap in there. You could throw on some emojis. It was a glorified iMessenger, with the benefit of ephemerality.

Things changed when Snapchat launched Stories in 2013. Now, your communication wasn’t just one-to-one, or one-to-a few. It was one-to-many. Those many were your friends – that is, if you had them on Snapchat.

With Stories, Snapchat becomes a 2) medium for public, visual storytelling. You know, like how print, radio, or video are storytelling mediums. Snapchat provides the tools (in-app recording, illustrating and asset-stitching), as well as the interactive platform to view it all in. Now I’m not recording random hilarities in the street and sending them to individual contacts. I’m constructing a visual Story on Snapchat, and slapping it up for all my friends to see.

Now, anyone can make a Story. And they can get creative! Before NPR, I teamed up with a friend for a Story series that involved us snapping our unenthused, stuffed fox’s reactions to what he saw in a parade of art galleries. (The fox’s name was Eugene, if you’re wondering.)

NPR can also make Stories. NPR, however, is not your average user. As national media organizations, who are in the business of, well, media, jumped onboard, Snapchat was quick to adapt.

Almost one year ago, Snapchat launched Discover, making it an official 3) distribution platform for editorial content. Other content distribution platforms? Facebook. Twitter. Youtube. Netflix. Your Television. Nbd. Discover is the most unexpected thing to come out of Snapchat so far. It is now a player in the news space.

NPR, however, is not on Discover. We’re still using Stories to reach an audience on Snapchat and our relationship with our followers looks like this:

So, as Snapchat was adjusting who they were, we were tweaking what we did on the platform. This timeline summarizes our progression on the swerving Snapchat trail:

[You can find the corresponding Sandbox posts from the timeline below:

Fact of the Day (Alexander McCall)

Experimenting w/ Snapchat for News (Tajha Lanier)

Tajha + Wright’s tinkerings

Tajha’s takeaways

Making an Engaging Story (Aggi Ashagre)]

Now for my part. When I came to NPR, with a background in filmmaking, I focused on our approach to storytelling on Snapchat.

It involves four main concepts:

And the following steps:

The team that works to make this happen looks exactly like this: 

Note: NPR only hires stick figures

When we work together well, we make content like this:

Other Stories we’ve done have included a breakdown of an NPR newscast — from pitch to broadcast — and an informative look at the technology developed to help women with their periods. These two Stories are great examples of collaboration. They were both pitched to us from NPR units outside the Social Media Desk (Newscast and the Science Desk, respectively). Here’s a timeline of the Stories I worked on during my time at NPR, all of them featuring collaboration with journalists across the organization:

How has this new approach to Snapchat been doing? Really well. We get a lot of great, in-app feedback from our viewers, each time we post a Story. We even hear about it on Twitter, where they also tell us how much they love our Storytelling!

With the method outlined above, we now have a system for creating audience-engaging, Snapchat-native content. We still haven’t found a way to deliver on our audience’s biggest request, which was to post more often. I think it’s clear, however, that NPR has more room to grow on Snapchat.

Today, we’re taking a look back at 2015 to revisit the best things we learned about social media journalism. You won’t find all of our 2015 posts here, however. Instead, I’ve listed the meatier analyses and original writing we’ve authored. Similar to Mel Kramer’s mega recap from January 2015, I’ve sorted the list by topic, to help you find things quicker.

General Social Media

The Foundation of Social Media Journalism

Creating Effective Social Media Graphics for Journalism: What are social media graphics? When should you use them? Six styles. Best practices and considerations.

Why You Need a Digital Plan For Success: Case study from NPR’s Goats & Soda. Includes best practices.

Exploring quizzes with Qzzr: Quizzes aren’t dead. How to use them to boost engagement.

Social Media Meetups: Taking Online Conversations Offline: Lessons from hosting the Hidden Brain meetup

The best engagement happens in person: How publishers are using live events to build relationships with the audience.

Inside The New Social Platform ‘The List App’: Sharing lists is more fun than you’d think.

Periscope Tips for Reporters from Ari Shapiro and Rich Preston.

What We Learned From NPR’s First Periscope Experiment

Using Reddit For A Social Campaign

Facebook

Analyzing Facebook Lead-In Text Length: How long is too long? We found that the sweet spot (for click-throughs) is ~120 characters or less.

How Our Facebook Audience Helped Us Find Courage: Underscores the importance of reading comments and interacting with the audience.

NPR’s Facebook Puppet Newscast: What’s Up With That? An experiment in creating native Facebook video

Ari Shapiro: Social media as an extension of journalism itself: An important message for all journalists.

10 Things I Learned From Managing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest Social Media Campaign: A deep-dive into a multi-platform contest and tips on hosting a community.

Deciding which social platform/tools to use: We get this question a lot.

Thoughts on Facebook’s Q&A Feature

Twitter

Twitter Basics for Journalists, Part 1: What should I tweet? How often should I tweet? When should I tweet? Can I schedule tweets? How to perform a self audit.

Twitter Basics for Journalists, Part 2: All about hashtags

There’s more than one way to tweet a story: Headline plus link is not the best way to share your story.

Quoted tweets: The other retweet

Lessons from #PubRadioVoice: NPR’s Code Switch lead blogger Gene Demby dishes on how the team’s Twitter chat unexpectedly became a trending topic.

Snapchat

Calling All Snapchatters: Lessons we learned from our Snapchat followers.

A Tale Told in 36 Snaps: Showing how a radio story comes together, plus a Snapchat hack to get more followers.

Quick, practical Snapchat tips, from NPR’s Jerusalem correspondent Emily Harris

Engaging an audience on Snapchat: Six story types to try.

This Much I Know (About Snapchat): A great primer

[Early] Thoughts On Snapchat For News

Tumblr

The Deal With Tumblr: An analysis of NPR’s tumblr and recommendations

NPR’s Tumblr Guidelines

Crowdsourcing / Callouts

Six ways to crowdsource: Tow Center’s Guide to Crowdsourcing

How to Crowdsource for Ambient Sounds

How to successfully solicit and use audio callouts

6 Ways To Use Social Callouts

Others posts worth noting

Notes from Poynter’s Mobile News Summit

#RaceOnTech: Real-time public media storytelling around race, technology, and innovation

Why you should ditch iMessage for a day (and dip your thumbs into another messaging app): Serri Graslie gives WeChat a try.

5 Things I Learned About Podcast Culture In The U.K.

7 Strategies For Engaging Your Podcast’s Audience

Note: I’ve edited some of the original headlines so they make more sense in this format.

I’m Mabinty, the winter/spring Social Media Desk intern at NPR!

I’m a northern Virginia native but I was born in Sierra Leone in west Africa. I went to George Mason University (go patriots!) for undergrad. My major was English because I LOVE reading, seriously at any moment I probably have at least two books in my bag. I also had two minors: Women and Gender Studies and African and African American Studies. And now I’m working on my last semester at Georgetown University (Hoya Saxa) for a masters in journalism degree.

Right now my two journalism loves are social media and politics. But my favorite story topics center on race, gender and sexuality. In my spare time I especially love live-tweeting some of my favorite shows: Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, Empire, Blackish, Veep, Jane the Virgin, Bob’s Burgers, Power, Quantico and binge-watching Netflix shows.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk about social media, pop culture or journalism. You can find me on Twitter and on Tumblr. I basically have my iPhone glued to my hand.

Also I stan and will always stan for the Queen B, the best to ever do it, aka BEYONCE! #BeyHive

--Mabinty

Earlier this month, NPR’s Malaka Gharib and Lori Todd teamed up with National Public Media design intern Rachael Ketterer to work on a Serendipity Days / Mash-Up Days project. Held quarterly, these days allow employees to step outside their day jobs and work together on something new. Here’s what we were up to:

Sometimes you need more than 140 characters to carry your message. It’s no secret that using a photo in a tweet results in better engagement: more likes, more retweets, more clicks. But what if you want to use something other than a traditional photo?

Social media graphics are images designed specifically for social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on. They appear alongside the text of the post, though the best can stand on their own with no additional context. Oftentimes, social media graphics combine text with photos, illustrations or infographics. Social media graphics are optimized to work on many different screens at the same time, from large desktop monitors to smartphones. (They are not responsive images, however.)

Why should you care? Social media graphics can help your content travel beyond your established audience, as they’re shared more frequently than text-only tweets. They can serve many functions, too: promoting a live event, highlighting interesting quotes, and even educating the audience.

The success of social media graphics is measured by engagement metrics like reach, impressions, replies and retweets.

As visuals become increasingly important on social platforms, we researched how publishers are currently using social media graphics and distilled best practices for designing them.

Social Media Graphics: Six Styles

We looked at nearly 50 examples of social media graphics on Twitter, from news outlets like the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist, TIME Magazine and Vox; nonprofits like Amnesty International, Oxfam International and ONE; and influential groups like the World Bank, the U.N., and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

From this informal study, distinct styles of social media graphics emerged. Each of these styles served a specific need. We also noticed common features and practices across each of these styles.

Portrait Quotables

These quotables include a person’s likeness either with a photo or illustration. The combination of the image with the quote seem to be more compelling. Portrait quotables are helpful for live events or breaking news, especially if you don’t have a full story to direct people to yet.

Examples: Portrait Quotables

(1/2) "You're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency." #GOPDebate Jeb Bush takes a jab at Trump: pic.twitter.com/LxcWf22L5T

— AJ+ (@ajplus)

December 16, 2015

Pope Francis calls for urgent action on climate change http://t.co/4qjSdGgWnj pic.twitter.com/p8utISGCPX

— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol)

September 23, 2015

Common features: Portrait Quotables The quotes are short and the typeface is large. The image or portrait is clear and usually tightly cropped. Branding is usually included.

What we’re doing at NPR We use Quotable to quickly create text-only social media graphics. We’re currently experimenting with portrait quotables to see how they perform to text-only quotables.

Factoids

These social media graphics isolate a singular, shareable fact. They rely on text to carry the message.

Examples: Factoids

If we Let Girls Learn, this is how they could change the world: https://t.co/0oGTCxwmSb pic.twitter.com/ceEHAsCNIt

— ONE (@ONECampaign)

December 14, 2015

26 was a blur. pic.twitter.com/ZJjCrDOriy

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY)

October 3, 2015

Common features: Factoids The type is large and clear, dominating the graphic. Certain words or numbers are emphasized for greater visual impact. The graphics usually include branding.

What we’re doing at NPR We’ve iterated on the Quotable tool to create Factlist, a similar, text-only social media graphics generator that allows us to emphasize a handful of facts at a time. Factlist was created to share facts during breaking news situations, though it’s also great for features content, too. You can launch your own versions of Quotable and Factlist by accessing our open-source code.

Infographics

Information graphics make data accessible and engaging. These are best used when a story has a central compelling data point that you want to share with as many people as possible.

Examples: Infographics

Clinton's team can ask donors to give nearly $700K each. Here’s how > https://t.co/qc8s1HeHkM pic.twitter.com/NXDgXDDg3D

— NPR (@NPR) December 23, 2015

Two-thirds of the world’s electricity is still produced with fossil fuels, mostly coal http://t.co/0YDjjJK6XH pic.twitter.com/w1GAluAMii

— Post Graphics (@PostGraphics)

October 16, 2015

Common features: Infographics The graphic is focused on one central data point/set, not several in one. The data is easily readable on a small screen. Special attention is paid to typography and color.

Charts

These are traditional charts that are optimized for small screens.

Examples: Charts

Eritrea: perfectly safe, according to Britain's Home Office. Nonsense, says the UN https://t.co/nGOZXKZLul pic.twitter.com/J2pbih2ydG

— The Economist (@TheEconomist)

December 15, 2015

Poll: Trump and Cruz are the Republican front-runners, and Clinton would beat them both https://t.co/KicXRqSKcw pic.twitter.com/iLMqnhgVAP

— Vox (@voxdotcom)

December 15, 2015

Common features: Charts The most successful charts for social media have headlines that are easy to understand, legible numbers, include sources, and have clearly defined colors.

Content Promos

These graphics promote a series or special content, signaling to the audience that this content is different or special. These serve as a teaser to website content, or perhaps what’s to come.

Examples: Content Promos

#US policy fuels a pipeline of criminals to the U.S. and stolen cash to #Cuba http://t.co/KIYwI63BOR pic.twitter.com/psg3sJXynj

— Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel)

January 10, 2015

What victories for women's rights will there be in 2016? More ideas in our #TheWorldIn2016 magazine—out today pic.twitter.com/7immoJXcRY

— The Economist (@TheEconomist)

November 19, 2015

Common features: Content Promos These graphics include representative information about the series or story and help set reader expectations. When possible, series-specific branding is included to offset the content from the brand or publisher’s unrelated content.

Promotional (Events, Campaigns or Products)

These graphics include important information about a particular event, like a Twitter chat or a Reddit AMA; a campaign/hashtag; or a product or deal.

Examples: Promotional

RT if you're joining @Mike_Vogel & @Daisy_Betts for their @Reddit AMA tomorrow at 2PM. pic.twitter.com/9Y7zOo394D

— Childhood's End (@ChildhoodSyfy)

December 6, 2015

Our daily email briefing #FirstFT is live. It features must-reads from @FT and other sources http://t.co/kE2A2jYdo0 pic.twitter.com/Oq469FsEUl

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes)

October 27, 2014

Common features: Promotional These graphics quickly explain value of the event, product or action to the user, and include important details, like time, platform and brand.

Social Media Graphics: Best Practices for Journalism

Social media graphics should tell their own self-contained story. These images by nature are tiny nuggets of stories. They may travel totally separately from their parent tweets and stories. Be careful that in editing the story down for a social image, you’re not inadvertently being misleading or removing important context.

Not all content requires a social media graphic. It’s best to use them when you have a fact, quote, data point or message that is strong enough to stand on its own.

Success for social media graphics is not measured by click-throughs, but rather engagement metrics like reach, retweets, likes and impressions.

Create social media graphics with the user in mind. The audience will likely be consuming this graphic on a small screen. Keep the text concise and legible. Consider using color to make your graphic “pop” out of the Twitter stream.

Be mindful of tone (in text and visuals). The audience may only consume this portion of the story. Is what you’re highlighting appropriate to pull out in this particular context? Does it look and sound like your publication? Are we being balanced in deciding who and what to highlight this way? This is particularly relevant to politicians and contentious issues.

It takes time and resources to create good social media graphics. There is no singular template for these, so plan accordingly. Involve a designer early and work together.

Social Media Graphics: What We’ve Learned So Far

Social media graphics require design work beyond a template. If you’re interested in using social media graphics, you should consult with the appropriate social media and visual editors.

The templates we did see on Twitter were only for branding or creating text-only quotables. Some news outlets have developed templates for promotional social media graphics, particularly the 2016 elections.

Many of the Twitter posts with social media graphics had higher levels of engagement than those without. While we don’t have access to impressions and data on individual tweets, we saw there usually a higher number of retweets, replies and likes relative to other posts from the user.

There are special considerations for using photos within social media graphics. We can only use photos we have rights to. If a photo is used, a photo credit must be included. If you’re unsure of what photos are appropriate for social media graphics, talk with the appropriate social media and visual editors.

We hope that our research on social media graphics helps newsrooms beyond NPR better understand the roles of social media graphics. The six styles we’ve identified are a starting point for conversations between reporters, social media editors, producers and designers.

At NPR, we are continuing the conversation with our own visuals team and editors across the newsroom to see how we can best integrate social media graphics into projects and digital plans.

Thanks to Alyson Hurt and Katie Park, designers on NPR’s visuals team, for providing feedback and guidance on this project.

Today’s post comes from Malaka Gharib, editor at NPR’s Goats and Soda, and Dan Frohlich, digital metrics analyst for NPR. With Malaka’s guidance, the Goats and Soda team put together an extensive digital plan that paid off in more ways than one.

In October 2015, NPR Goats and Soda put the spotlight on 15-year-old girls trying to change their fortunes. These girls are dealing with everything from child marriage in India, to menstruation taboos in Nepal, to discrimination for playing soccer in Brazil. We told their stories through the web, radio and social media, united with the hashtag #15Girls.

Before we launched the content series, we created a digital plan that outlined our objectives and goals, including KPIs (key performance indicators) -- specific metrics that would help us know whether we actually reached those goals.

This plan helped us put together a project postmortem that helped tell a story of how #15Girls turned out. Among our top metrics, #15Girls stories had 112% more page views and a share rate (shares per view) that was 49% greater than the typical NPR.org blog post.

The series brought in more than 2.3 million page views to NPR.org.

The hashtag #15Girls was mentioned on Twitter 12,500 times.

The #15Girls reader was 49% more likely to be a woman aged 25-34, Goats and Soda’s target audience for the series, than the typical NPR.org reader. Although, compared to previous traffic to the Goats and Soda blog, we also saw an increased interest in these stories from an older demographic.

#15Girls readers were 49% more likely to share these stories than readers of all other NPR blog stories.

Our callout, “What was the hardest thing about being 15?” gathered 1,050 submissions on Snapchat, The List App, Twitter, Facebook and NPR.org comments.

Strategy

It took the better half of a year for the Goats and Soda team and its partners on the International Desk to put together a list of top shelf stories with unique angles and compelling subjects. But that was only part of the job. We put just as much effort into making sure our stories reached a large audience.

Goats and Soda put together a digital plan that outlined our series’ mission statement, objectives, KPIs and timeline. We also drew upon various teams at NPR -- marketing, media relations, the social media desk -- and external nonprofit groups to find ways to authentically engage our audience with the content. This plan helped all teams sing from the same songsheet and ensure that all actions were helping to achieve our goals.

After looking at the data we came up with a few conclusions on what really helped our stories take off:

Time, effort, quality and resources pay off. The stories that had the most funding, took the most time to create, had the best photography did significantly better than the other stories in terms of page views, share rate, time on page, and all other key metrics.

Creating an external distribution plan helps reach the target demographic and relevant influencers. We put together a list of a dozen nonprofit organizations in the girls’ rights space and told them about #15Girls series in advance, using a social media toolkit. They provided a regular flow of social posts to the series, and helped nearly 100 other nonprofits and influencers discover and share #15Girls.

Having a social media action helped create a deeper sense of empathy around our #15Girls subjects. The responses we got from nearly 1,050 people on Twitter, Facebook, comments, The List App and Snapchat were surprisingly poignant and personal -- our audience was able to find ways to relate to the challenges of the girls we featured

Working with other teams helped produce some of our most innovative work. Our Snapchat story and List App content were coordinated by the social media and training teams. The #15Girls Snapchat stories were viewed between 6,000 to 15,000 times, and were some of the top stories on the platform this year. The List App post garnered 30 submissions to the call out and responses from Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak.

Including the hashtag in the headline helped with brand recognition. People started to associate our content series with the hashtag and used it when mentioning our stories on social media. We used the hashtag in the headlines of our stories, which picked up and translated to Twitter as a “mention” whenever people shared the link.  

Even while the series was a tremendous success, we discovered a few things along the way that we could improve:

We were inspired to think beyond Facebook. Significant traffic came from referrals (see graph below), the NPR newsletter and media. We should create plans for those distribution strategies in the future.

Repost stories to Facebook. Sometimes reposting brought in 5,000 more page views, and sometimes it brought in 40,000. Either way, more promotion couldn’t hurt -- but there’s a tradeoff between trying to find the right way to tell that story versus moving onto our next great story.

Our organic search traffic was lower than average for NPR.org. This is nothing new for many NPR blogs and historically we’ve primarily written headlines to be used on social media. SEO is important. Going forward we’re going to utilize a separate field in our CMS to draft search friendly headlines too.

We need more lead time before publish date and when we get content in. It takes times to create headlines, captions and social media language that help frame the story to ensure a great connection with the audience.

Strong visual reporting takes time and planning. This is especially true for stories whose main characters may only grant limited access for both photography and radio. In these cases, we may want to send a photographer with the radio reporter to ensure that the photographer isn’t shut out later.