Marketing &
Audience Engagement
“It’s not about the size of the community. It’s how engaged that community is.” Blake Chandlee
Journalism is about the audience. We report on things that they’re involved or interested in, we feature them when they participate in something notable or exciting, and we serve them by producing nonpartisan news, entertainment, and sports content.
There are a lot of factors that go into running a publication, and throughout my three years on my school magazine's staff I have learned a lot about how we can work as a team to fundraise, print, and distribute our work to our peers.
I also have learned a lot about audiences through running both The Whirlwind Instagram and the Albany Visitors Association Instagram. There are some strategies that I experimented with that weren’t effective, and others that skyrocketed traffic to the website. It’s really a matter of trying out different strategies and getting to know your audience, their wants, needs, likes and dislikes. I find the marketing side of journalism very intriguing, and I have immensely enjoyed the time that I’ve been able to learn about what goes on behind the scenes of publication promotion.
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Online Engagement
Whirlwind Instagram Engagement
A virtual year in 2020-21 made audience engagement more important than ever. Distributing magazines during the school day was an easy way to get people to read our content. When it’s a tangible creation, kids are much more willing to pick it up and flip through it, and we lost that aspect of student journalism last year. Instagram was the main way that we settled on promoting our content. A lot of the time, people would share posts that were advertising a story they were interested in on their own accounts, which boosted engagement quite a bit. Other times I had to come up with strategies to drive traffic to the website in other ways, like polls and elements that our readers could engage with.
Story Polls & Promotional Posts
The main thing that I utilized The Whirlwind Instagram for was promotional material so that students, parents, and faculty would be aware of the content that we were producing. When a new story was posted on the site, I asked that the staff tell me and send me their featured visual so that I could promote it and link it on Instagram. Interactive stories were also a way that I was able to increase engagement. When our audience engages with our content, the Instagram algorithm is more likely to show them our content first in the future. The easiest way to get our audience to interact with The Whirlwind account was to post stories asking for opinions or ask people to answer questions.
Story Promotion for the opinion podcast "Hot Takes" with Ethan Biersdorff:
This story promotion was one of the most successful that I did, because the interaction that the stories promoted skyrocketed the amount of people that The Whirlwind account was shown to.
& more slides similar to these
Successful promotional posts that were shared on viewer's profiles & gained website traffic:
These posts and ones like them serve to attract readers to our profile and subsequently our website to view the stories that we post. If readers liked a story or are interested in a subject we post about, a lot of times they share the post on their own profiles.
There are many small, seemingly insignificant factors that go into growing an account. In reality, each and every detail is important to note when posting content and analyzing growth. Posting time, number of slides, amount of hashtags, and length of caption are all things that play a big part in how well a post ends up doing.
Albany Visitors Association Instagram Engagement
When I was put in charge of The Albany Visitors Association’s Instagram, I had already handed the responsibility of The Whirlwind Instagram off to two very capable Social Media Directors for this year. That meant I had more time to focus on increasing engagement for the AVA and I could learn from the experience I had running The Whirlwind account. I wanted to organize my posting schedule better and utilize hashtags to their full extent. I also knew that because I had both a larger and older demographic for this account, I would have to change some of the aspects of how I engaged them.
Using posts to promote blogs and drive traffic to the website
After I write a blog for the AVA or someone else on staff publishes a blog, I’ll draft and schedule a post to promote it. Many times, the post will include a brief summary of what the blog is about, and how readers can access it. All of our photos are used with permission from an AVA flickr account where Albany photographers submit their photos once a year for a photo contest. We also have a volunteer photographer on staff that helps collect great promotional pictures. Our main goal at the AVA is to increase tourism and engagement with local businesses, so I often promote events, sales, and activities that local places are hosting.
Successful promotional posts that were shared on viewer's profiles & gained website traffic:
Insight analysis for the AVA Instagram
One of the things I learned from running The Whirlwind Instagram last year was that it’s hard to maintain account growth when you’re not posting on a consistent schedule. I come into the AVA office in person on Tuesday and Thursday, so most of the time I consistently post two times a week on those two days. I also frequently check engagement and growth on Instagram’s Creator Studio, where I can see what the best times to post are and what types of posts get the highest engagement.
Most active times on the AVA Instagram analytics:
I examine the time analytics on a regular basis to see how the activeness of the AVA's followers is evolving from week-to-week. As seen below, the audience of the AVA is largely adults, so usually I schedule posts between 5:30pm - 6:30pm, because the majority of adults are off of work by then and have time to decompress by scrolling through social media.
Additional Analytics:
On the far left is the screen on which I can view the ages and genders of followers. This information gives me valuable insights to help me determine the times at which I should post, and what kind of content viewers will be able to relate to.
Immediately left is the analytics for an individual post. I usually check these analytics an hour after I post, and then a day after I post. Doing this can show me when the post gets the most attention, how many people shared it, and what causes a post to gain momentum.
Additional Tools For Organization & Engagement
There are many tools that can be utilized for instagram and other social media platforms that help organize content and promote website traffic. Two of the tools that I’ve found most helpful in my time managing social media accounts are Linktree and Linkinbio.
Linktree
Linktree is a helpful service that allows me to connect all of the content I want to one link within an Instagram account’s bio. This way, if I’m promoting a specific article or blog post, I can direct readers to the link in our bio, and rather than having to dig through a website to find the article, they can just click on one of the buttons on the Linktree and it will take them directly there. It seems like a small difference, but cutting out the middleman and making content more accessible to readers makes them much more willing and likely to read it.
LinkinBio
I only used Linkinbio for The Whirlwind’s Instagram account while I was running it, but it was helpful in the sense that readers could scroll back as far as they wanted to read an article we may have posted a long time ago. With Linktree, I usually trade out previously advertised articles and blogs with newly posted ones so that the list of links doesn’t look too daunting. Linkinbio is easy to link lots of stories to because it’s format is almost exactly like Instagram, so readers can just click directly on the article they’re interested in to be directed to it.