A Peek Into Harvard Business Review’s Social Strategy
While our CUNY Social Journalism class is continuing to manage the Facebook pages of several nonprofit organizations, we’ve been engaging in some lively conversation around how to build an effective strategy and measure our success. We’re learning the value of taking a hands-on approach using trial and error to determine what works for building engagement. We are fortunate that our professor, Thomas McBee, is Editor and Director of Growth for Quartz, a national leader in social media audience growth.
This week Thomas introduced us to his colleague, Walter Frick, Senior Associate Editor at the Harvard Business Review. We had the opportunity to hear how the HBR manages their Facebook page, the primary driver of their traffic. Their magazine has been around for 90+ years and they’ve built a strong social following in recent years. The HBR’s niche content is a little broader than it was a couple of decades ago — it’s not so much news content, but it’s primarily designed to help people improve job performance and make better business decisions.
When Walter started at HBR as an editor, he was only minimally involved with social media. Eventually his team felt that they needed to be more directly connected to their audience, so they set out to optimize their social strategy. While Walter wasn’t hired as an audience development person, he grew into that role — thinking more like an editor than a marketer would. His goal has been to find the best engagement methods and audience strategy for developing and distributing quality content.
While page views and comments have primarily been used in the past and many talk of time spent on a page or how far a user has scrolled down, HBR has been thinking more about subsetting their audience. Instead of trying to find a metric to replace the page view, like a type of engagement, they’re thinking more about subportions of their audience and have focused on people who have come back to their site again and again— they’re using standard metrics and applying them to subsets. Reporting on the success of their articles or whether a particular topic has resonated includes more than overall reach — they want to know how well or how poorly something performed for those who come to the site on a regular basis — their loyal audience and subscribers. They tend to spend less time looking at Facebook analytics and more time in Google analytics looking at the large volume of users who have made several visits in a period of time, traffic stripping out new users and identifying the people who are getting prolonged value over time.
In terms of content, HBR has been looking at their success stories to determine what about them is worth replicating and what resonates the most with their loyal users. For example, last November, they had huge success with an article they posted, “What Kind of Thinker Are You?” They’ve discovered that their audience likes articles where they can place themselves on a spectrum to see where they fit into the idea. Since people tend to like the quiz mentality of seeing where they fall, HBR has taken that same approach and applied it to other topics.
HBR has a niche business audience and they’re overworked, so it’s no surprise that they’re interested in topics that help them cope, and even give them permission to do things during the workday that they may not typically be allowed to do. Deciding on content is a mix of pouring through data and using intuitive judgement. According to Walter, they’re lucky in that their loyal visitors tend to like many of the same types of articles that their overall audience likes, so it’s not a huge deal — but when in doubt, they always go with the signals of what that loyal audience is repsonding to.
Walter believes that we can get a lot of mileage by thinking about what types of things people are interested in sharing. He said it’s basically just thinking about why someone would share something in the middle of the day on their phone, for example. It’s an intuition that he says can be developed over time by recognizing patterns from feedback and it’s important to empathize with that. He said that if you put yourself in the shoes of the users, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of it.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at HBR’s Facebook posts, particularly those that have resonated with their core audience of loyal users. Here are a few examples:
The most important advice from Walter Frick of the HBR — just put out really good practical content that answers a problem in a quality way.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to share your valuable insights, Walter. You’ve given our class of social journalists some important things to consider as we develop our own social strategies.
