#audience development

It wasn’t until White noticed images from the film inundating his feeds on Twitter and Instagram that he seriously considered watching it. In the Bird Boxuniverse, looking at one of the world’s invisible monsters causes people to immediately die by suicide, a grim reality that requires Bullock’s character, Malorie, and her fellow survivors to spend most of the film blindfolded. For that reason, screen shots of the movie were almost immediately recognizable and—because humans look clumsy while navigating the world with their vision shielded—ripe for mimicry. Images of Bullock rowing a boat down a river while blindfolded became the first of many joke backdrops that eventually led to a full-blown raid of the film’s most intense moments to harvest fresh memes. People referred to tertiary Bird Box characters by their first names, the same way that Stranger Things fans toss around the name “Barb.” In an effort to promote the film earlier in December, Netflix presented a handful of well-known Twitch gamers with a Bird Box “challenge,” asking them to play their favorite game while blindfolded. (This is the type of sponsorship that is often offered to popular influencers on various social networks.) But as the search term “bird box” surged the week of Christmas, creators began integrating the concept into their videos unprompted. YouTubers applied the Bird Boxchallenge to their daily lives, pawing through Popeyes drive-throughs and stumbling on escalators in the name of clicky content. TikTok users fashioned their own signature, blindfolded dance. At least one Atlanta nightclub is hosting a Bird Box–themed party, complete with a “blindfolded shot for shot challenge.”

Not the modern journalism course timetable. Private Eye.

I’m about to meet my fourth cohort of  Interactive Journalism MA students at City University, London.

I step out of my role as head of audience growth at Vogue International for two hours a week to teach the practical element of the social media, community and multimedia management module; Adam Tinworth teaches the theoretical side.

Here are my notes from the first lesson. This covers:

What does a social media editor do?

What’s audience development?

What is a growth editor?

How have these roles changed within the past year?

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

What does a social media editor do?

News organisations started to introduce social media editors about a decade ago to gather and distribute news via social, predominantly using Facebook and Twitter. Here’s an interview from 2009 with Alex Gubbay, the first social media editor at the BBC, explaining what his role would be.

Asked in the Guardian interview if he would play a role in the distribution of news, he said: 

“Indeed, part of my work will be to extend the news and distribute them into the social networks, so that people can discuss them. We learn from the discussions that built on the stories themselves, pick up details we missed, or factor them into how we are approaching a story.”

The role was fairly similar – though needed less explaining to fellow journalists – when I joined The Wall Street Journal as a social media editor in December 2013.

I remember explaining back then that there were four areas to the role:

Engagement

Traffic

Reach / Brand awareness

Social newsgathering

Engagement

I first got interested in social media when, in 2007 and 2008, I was a broadcast journalist. The commercial radio station I worked for had fantastic community of people who would text in. This was the time that Facebook and Twitter started to gain traction and I enjoyed similar listener and engagement online. Ten years on and social provides a way for news brands to host communities of readers. This happens through commenting on site and social and Facebook groups, for example. A social media editor may respond to comments or take an action as simple as liking an Instagram post or Facebook comment, showing the reader the news brand is listening.

In 2014 I wrote how engagement is key to keeping people returning to a news site or brand.

Traffic

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and other social platforms have been an important source of traffic to news sites. News startups sprouted up as Facebook and other platforms provided millions of eyeballs to stories. And while Facebook traffic has dropped significantly over the past year (more on that later), it still provides 28% of traffic to the news publishers that use Parsely, an analytics tool.

Reach / brand awareness

A social media editor also plays a role in increasing the brand awareness of a publication. I remember hearing Buzzfeed UK editor in chief Janine Gibson speak at Hacks/Hackers in December 2015 when Buzzfeed traffic had exploded. She made the point that even though the site of course cared about on-platform engagement, it was equally as important for Buzzfeed to have brand reach, whether logo on a social card on Twitter or a native post on Facebook.

Social newsgathering

Social newsgathering has become a whole field in itself, with agencies such as Storyful and organisations like Bellingcat being the pioneering experts. But for many social media editors, their role extends to monitor trends, hot topics and news events via social.

What is audience development?

Audience development roles have developed over the past five years. As this 2014 Digiday article notes, “The New York Times’ Innovation Report pointed out the need for audience-development specialists to get Times content in front of more readers.”

This 2017 Digiday article explains the current climate – and how audience development a focus for both the newsroom and for the commercial side of the business.

“Audience development has become core to how publishers scale and make money. But now the question facing publishers is how to ensure it serves all sides of the business, whose interests often conflict.”

“Once a role that mainly focused on SEO, audience development has become more complicated because of the explosion of ways publishers can find and distribute content, from their own platforms such as newsletters and apps to external ones such as social media outlets and bots.”

“At the most fundamental level, both the business and edit sides want to reach new and existing audiences. But from there the interests can diverge. Whereas the newsroom wants to maximize the reach and impact of its journalism, the sales side is rewarded for growing ad revenue, which could lead it to prioritize certain audience segments over others. And then there is driving subscriptions and marketing other products like events and commerce.”

Blogging about an ONA conference on audience development in 2016, I offered this definition of audience development

“Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.”

I still agree with my definition from a couple of years ago and expand it to say the field involves identifying a target audience and reaching those people and keeping them engaged.

And, of course, audiences may be engaged off platform. For example, launching Vogue on Snapchat has delivered millions of new, loyal weekly readers. But our owned and operated sites get zero traffic from Snapchat. So what’s in it for the publisher? Brand reach, young audiences and revenue share from the Snap advertising.

What does an audience growth editor do?

Julia Haslanger wrote this Medium post in 2015 answering that question. She quotes Thomas McBee, Quartz’s inaugural director of growth. 

“McBee says that when there’s an obstacle to growth, it’s most often an editorial obstacle, such as a story not being framed or headlined in a way that will resonate with the audience.” 

That still holds true. As head of audience growth I spend a lot of time guiding headline changes.

Here are Haslanger’s points on the role of a growth editor:

Identifying potential new audiences

Reaching out to people who might be interested in a specific story or event.

Shaping stories — and particularly headlines — to resonate with readers

Following up with new readers to build a relationship

Pushing the organization to go beyond the regular sources for stories

Analytics. Analytics. Analytics.

Assigning and shaping stories on trending topics

Events

I manage an eight-person audience growth team and consider our function as supporting the audience growth of the network of Vogues and GQs.

I’m advertising for a maternity cover and state in the ad that the primary function of my role as "responsible for audience development strategy, guidelines and a consistent approach to headlines, content packaging and SEO and identifying editorial opportunities based on audience data.”

Audience growth, in my view, relies on a three-part strategy:

Content strategy

Distribution strategy

Community strategy

The content strategy part includes:

Shaping stories. It’s helpful to think that every digital story starts with an audience of zero and it is our job as audience growth editors to find the right audience for that story.

Thinking audience-first in how people will find stories. That might mean commissioning a story that plays into a Pinterest trend, for example.

Guiding a broad offering of stories that appeal to large numbers of people

That includes evergreen content that delivers long-tail audiences

Shepherding in-depth, quality reporting that delights and keeps readers returning

Developing series to attract loyal readers

The distribution strategy part of the role includes:

SEO, social, email newsletter, and off-platform strategies

Working with product to ensure sites and platforms are optimised for search

The community strategy part includes:

Ensuring the brands host conversations and communities to keep people engaged and connected

And all of the above are underpinned with data.

What’s changed in the past year?

As this is my fourth year of teaching and updating my slides, it’s apparent that this year the social, audience and growth roles have shifted due to the Facebook algorithm change.

The move by Facebook to prioritise friend and family posts over those from news organisations and brands was announced in January. But Facebook traffic had been dropping for several months.

Data from Chartbeat (the first chart) and Parsely (the second chart) shows Facebook traffic declined throughout the previous year.

This algorithm change particularly hit VC-funded, ad-supported news startups including Mashable, Vice and Buzzfeed. But there have been positive stories for some publishers this year. Chartbeat noted in May that mobile direct traffic started to eclipse Facebook traffic, suggesting readers were going direct to sites rather than accessing via Facebook.

And social, audience and growth roles have shifted with the algorithms. The editors’ roles still include Facebook but there’s renewed focus on the following:

Search / SEO. You will have noted the rise in Google traffic in the charts above

Email newsletters, which offer direct relationships with audiences

Diverse and distributed traffic, including Flipboard, Pinterest, Upday, for example

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

In the final part if lesson 1, I take the students through the skills that publishers are looking for by going through job ads (such as this one, this one, this one, this one and this one. 

Image by Cristophe Benoit. Creative Commons

In the third class with my Interactive Journalism MA students we looked at analytics and creating an audience strategy.

In lesson 1 we looked at the role that audience development plays in a newsroom and summarised it as:

“Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.”

We need to know the top-level goals of an organisation before we can devise an audience strategy.

The Guardian’s overall goals are advertising and membership; the New York Times is aiming for subscribers; Buzzfeed’s model is one of scale and branded content; The Times is around subscriber revenue.

These news organisations with different goals all require different audience strategies and KPIs.

The Guardian cares about scale (for advertising) and therefore probably focuses on pageviews or unique users and fostering a community of loyal users, those that show a high propensity to donate through the membership scheme – which has reached 900,000, according to Digiday.

The New York Times is looking for repeat visitors who return frequently enough to hit the metered paywall. The NYT found that newsletter subscribers are twice as likely as regular New York Times readers to become subscribers. It is therefore worth the Times investing in a range of newsletters (it has 50 newsletters reaching 13 million people).

Buzzfeed, on the other hand, is looking for scale and likely cares most about reaching large, engaged audiences that will stick around to read branded content. A KPI for Buzzfeed is likely pageviews or uniques and engagement time with stories.

You get the idea that there’s no one-size-fits-all audience strategy.

Chasing clicks, chasing scale. From this week’s Private Eye

Students were asked to develop and audience strategy for Interhacktives.com, the site they will manage and write for during the next nine months.

They were asked what the overall goal of the site was and to decide on three or four KPIs.  

Creating an audience strategy

Once KPIs have been set (such as unique users or loyal users, for example), the next step is to create an audience strategy. In my view, there should be three parts: a content strategy, a distribution strategy, and a community or engagement strategy.

Here’s the briefest of introductions:

Content strategy

If the aim is to reach a large audience, you need content with wide appeal. If the aim is to reach a particular type of audience (student journalists in the case of Interhacktives.com, for example), the content has to be tailored to the desired audience’s needs. To engage loyal readers, there must be content that makes people return. This will likely include longform content, informative articles that helps a person in their job or learn about an interest, and it may include series or franchises which promote familiarity and repeat visits.

Distribution strategy

The next step required is working out how to get stories to the right people – and how to position the stories for each platform. For example, if student journalists all use Twitter, that’s a key distribution platform for Interhacktives.com.

A distribution strategy will include an SEO strategy, Facebook strategy, email newsletter strategy and aggregators such as Flipboard.

Community / engagement strategy

The third part of an audience strategy focuses on the community and engagement. You may decide to reply to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter comments, for example, to host and engage your audience.

The next step is to measure, test and learn against the KPIs and encourage the audience that will help you achieve your goals.

Here are the previous lessons:

Here’s the interesting quote:

“Is there going to be a backlash and people will think, ‘Fuck you guys for that!’” but that’s really happened with every time the show kills off a major character: Never again! Fuck you! I’m never going to watch this show! and, you know, they keep coming back."

This is interesting b/c they doesn't really understand the difference between revealing something that fans want in an unexpected way and how killing off a character is tied to representation and identity.

4 Growth Strategies to Attract More Customers 4 Growth Strategies to Attract More Customers – A funnel funnels metal balls into rising bar graph columns over weeks How to Attract More Customers is the ultimate goal for business owners moving through 2026. For small and medium enterprises (SMBs) and healthcare practitioners across Surat, Mumbai, the US, and Germany, the market has completely…

You’ve made it. Your film just had its world premiere. Maybe at a prestigious festival. Maybe at a regional one that truly loved your work. You walked the carpet, took the Q&A mic, shook hands with buyers, and finally exhaled. Now what? If your answer is “wait and see,” you’re already behind. Because the truth is, the smartest filmmakers don’t go into festivals hoping to get lucky. They go in…