“We’ve Only Been Using CrowdTangle a Month and Our Referrals Are Up 26%”
Just weeks after getting access to CrowdTangle, La Gaceta Salta — a three-year old Argentine local news outlet with accelerating growth and a burgeoning online audience — was seeing value in their newsroom.
The La Gaceta Salta team had a problem on their hands: They wanted to increase engagement on Facebook and the reach of their publications to build an active community of readers, and hadn’t found a good solution. They began using CrowdTangle to help track what was working among their content, what wasn’t, and to track their competitors.
After just a couple weeks using the CrowdTangle platform, digital editor Pablo Hamada summed it up: “We started to see the increase that we were looking for immediately, more likes, comments, and shares within the community.”
With higher engagement also came higher reach and more traffic.
“We’ve only been using the product a month and our referrals are up 26%,” Hamada says. “We’re getting more engagement from our readers, as well as more fans. In August, we had 154,000 likes and in the end of September 200,000 likes, all organic.”
CrowdTangle gives the La Gaceta Salta clear daily and weekly indicators of what’s resonating with their readers. The team is able to evaluate what’s working on both the content level and the page level. More crucially, they’re able to get this same analysis for their competitors.
“We are growing because of what we’re seeing and using to strategize within CrowdTangle and hope to continue that growth on Facebook,” Hamada says.
La Gaceta Salta’s success has been a simple recipe of customizing CrowdTangle’s core features to fit their needs. Hamada summed up the process they took in their first month into three simple steps:
Step. 1: Customize your lists
Build a local list of competitors, as well as politicians and national media … (here’s how to do that). Make sure to track the verticals and benchmarks that are important to you, asLa Gaceta Salta did.
Step. 2: Tie it to a viral alert
Hamada says he has connected this CrowdTangle list of politicians and local media to CrowdTangle alerts via Slack and is comparing his organization’s growth to competitors. La Gaceta Salta implemented this action during elections. In October, the outlet had a record number of visits for election day, quadrupling the previous record.
Step. 3: Get the rest of the team involved in the action
Hamada says that opening CrowdTangle up to the rest of the newsroom was clutch. The team had the single mission of collaborating to best their competitors. La Gaceta Salta started at 4th [in the CrowdTangle leaderboard] and are now 2nd in interactions in a little over a month.
Results:
“We were able to track what politicians and national media were saying, and localize that content to the La Gaceta Salta community. The elections generated a lot of debate on Facebook. We were interested in locating these discussions for our readers. We generated native content for Facebook that ended up being both highly shared and commented. We believe that readers found a space for debate in our publications, and that is very valuable for us.”
