How The Daily Mirror Rolled CrowdTangle Out to Their Entire Newsroom
There are 40 hours in each work week, and Heather Bowen, The Daily Mirror’s head of social media, was spending a full 8 hours each week manually pulling together social analytics reports. She was also spending a considerable amount of time hunting down the source of spikes in Facebook traffic to the Mirror, one of Britain’s biggest national news titles. Certainly not a very efficient use of time.
Earlier this year, Heather and her team at the Mirror began using CrowdTangle to make both processes much more efficient.
“The automated reports (CrowdTangle Digests) have freed up a lot of that time so we can focus on implementing our strategies and publishing more content,” Heather says.
“The Chrome Extension is something we’re constantly using, to check what social [engagement] a particular piece of content has and when.”
The CrowdTangle lists that power these reports have been crucial to the Mirror’s success. Heather and her team spent time customizing their dashboard to build out lists and saved searches that were relevant to the specific type of national and local news the Mirror wanted to track. From there, Heather and her team took it a step further, building out new dashboards that were relevant to each of the Mirror’s verticals.
“Because we’re a big editorial team, with groups of staff dedicated to different types of content, we created an array of dashboards for each team (sports, showbiz, etc.) so that all the lists in their dashboards were relevant to them,” Heather explains.
“We also had to create a lot of bespoke lists within those dashboards because the ones that come as standard are U.S.-focused and we’re a UK publication that needs to focus more on more UK-based Pages, people and searches.”
The team checks their dashboards daily to see what content is performing well (or not so well) across all of their various titles, as well as competitors. Heather has also created daily and weekly automated digests for each.
“This informs our editorial decisions,” Heather says.
From there, Heather and her team also pull customized reports, especially when investigating certain topics and changes. For example, her team used CrowdTangle to analyze how Mirror content performed during the Westminster attack.
“That worked really well,” Heather says. “Anything that stands out from these reports, we then feed back to the wider team.”
On a different note …
One of the questions we hear most often at CrowdTangle is how companies have successfully rolled out CrowdTangle across the organization. Heather has a few tips:
“At first I just started playing around with it to get an idea of the different use cases that would benefit the Mirror. I also used that time to identify people in the company that would best suit becoming early adopters, whom I then worked with on trialling different workflows. We all found it fairly intuitive, but still asked CrowdTangle to give us online training to make sure we weren’t missing anything. From there we rolled out tailored training to our reporters and that training is still ongoing.”
If you’re interested in learning more about any of the features above, here are some resources:
Any more Qs? Reach out to support@crowdtangle.com!
