#wright bryan

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.

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. 

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.

Today, 4 generations of social media @nprinterns​ convened and it was cute. Wright Bryan & Lori Todd, you raised them well. 

P.S. Their job isn’t all just fun & games, it can be serious too.

Last week we changed the name of our primary Twitter account from @NPRnews to @NPR. It’s a switch we’d been talking about making for years. I think of the change as just a bit of tidying up. But others see it as a significant shift. So, let me offer this recap of how we came to rename our account:

How we settled on @NPRnews in the first place is a story lost in time. Andy Carvin could probably tell us, but he’s a bit busy these days with Reported.ly. Suffice to say, for years (until now) the newsroom tweeted out of @NPRnews and NPR’s communications team tweeted out of @NPR. On almost all other social platforms, editorial posted from accounts simply labeled “NPR.”

Simply put, users have been confused by how we’ve identified ourselves on Twitter. Many who were following @NPR before the switch thought this account was our main news account. Now it is. With the help of Twitter, @NPR became @NPRextra. An account with 500K followers, it is still run by our corporate team. Nothing has changed but the name. And the same is true of @NPRnews. It is now @NPR, but hasn’t changed in terms of followers (3.7 million) or content. Along with the switch, we did create a new @NPRnews account that merely points people over to @NPR.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us in the same place that we started, excepting that our naming conventions now make sense. @NPR is home to all of the editorial content you expect from NPR and @NPRextra is the corporate voice of the company.

Now, we’ll set our sights on Snapchat, the only account we still have that’s branded @NPRnews.

It’s Friday, so I was thinking of slacking off on the sandbox today. But no! I was inspired enough by these items to want to share them with you:

1. Watch Tamara Keith on Snapchat! Always game to try something new, Tam is taking over the NPR Snapchat account while traveling with Clinton campaign this weekend. Follow “nprnews” on Snapchat to ride along. (You have to download the Snapchat app and start an account to follow us.)

2. Laura Sullivan made the front page of reddit! Laura took part in an AMA today organized by ProPublica for discussion of their reporting on fundraising and relief work by the American Red Cross in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. As I write this note, the AMA is the #3 link on reddit and has generated more than 1,300 comments. This is a great example of both collaboration and engagement.

3. Let’s talk about Rachel Dolezal. Code Switch is leading the way again when it comes to engaging with the audience about a story that is happening now. This is what an intelligent, compelling conversation looks like on Twitter. Take a look at their call to action and then take a look at their Twitter feed.

4. Recommended Twitter account: Madhulika Sikka. I remember talking about Twitter with Madhulika years ago at Morning Edition. I expected it to go as so many of these conversations have gone: lots of enthusiasm, little action. Six thousand tweets later, I use her as an example to others of how you establish a social identity. We’ll definitely miss her leadership here at NPR.

Enjoy your weekend!

This morning we had yesterday’s sandbox today. Now we have today’s sandbox today. Enjoy!

1. Twitter removing 140 character limit from DMs. In a note to developers, Twitter says that it will remove the 140 character limit from Direct Messages starting in July. Woohoo! I always wondered why the limit existed in the DM space. I think removing the limit makes the DM function more useful. But it’s a cultural change and it will be interesting to see what unintended consequences flow from this move. h/t Steve Mullis

2. What’s the go-to source for Caribbean news on Twitter? It’s @Caribbean360, according to Kenya Downs. She says: "It aggregates news regardless of language or sovereignty. So if I want to know what’s happening in Martinique (a French territory) even though I don’t speak French or follow much news from France, I can find it there.” The Caribbean’s not your thing? Whatever your interests, whatever your beat, there are always handful of keystone Twitter accounts you should follow to stay plugged in to the communities you care about.

3. “Old millennials, young Millennials, Middlennials.” Hootsuite’s Evan LePage recently wrote a piece arguing that you can’t really target Millennials in the social space. He says they’re just too diverse in their behaviors. They are not, actually, one addressable group. LePage suggests watching and listening to them to better understand their wants and needs. Sage advice, although it has to be noted that LePage is trying to sell a product. h/t Lori Todd

Questions? Comments? Brickbats for not mentioning that Dick Costolo is stepping down? Bring ‘em on.