Building an Online Engaged Audience for Immersive Stories: An Experiment

As a small news team that specializes in immersive storytelling, we’ve got the odds stacked against us when it comes to building an engaged audience across all of our distribution platforms. Why?

1. We don’t do breaking news: We produce short documentaries that focus on important topics and issues about communities of colour and the Global South. While we definitely have an edge when it comes to bringing the stories that often go under-reported to light — especially from a local perspective — our projects take a lot longer, so we don’t have a constant barrage of new material to distribute and stay relevant in the dizzying, 24-hour news cycle.
2. Most people don’t have access to a headset: Though we do publish our 360-degree/virtual reality documentaries on Facebook and YouTube, our documentaries are best suited for watching on headsets, like the Samsung GearVR, HTC Vive and Oculus Go. Most people also prefer linear videos when scrolling through content on social media, mainly because they’re unfamiliar with 360-degree videos.

These barriers, coupled with being a tiny team within a news organization that already has an established brand (Al Jazeera), at times made us feel like we were screaming — er, releasing — our content into the void.

So, how did we overcome this? Well… we haven’t, but we’re working on it.

We’ve come up with a plan that tackles and solves each of these issues head-on. We’re week one into implementing it and we’d like to share our thought process — for feedback, and in case any of you are dealing with the same issues.

Courtesy of Search Engine Journal

Defining our brand and voice (while keeping our strengths in mind):

We’ve decided to relaunch the Contrast brand on social media, with a clearer identity of what the brand and the people behind it stand for.

We know we have to establish a consistent style and voice across all of our platforms, in order to build an audience that is active, engaged and loyal to our content. But, it isn’t just about establishing a consistent voice or a consistent style. The only way to find others who share our values — who are interested in hearing the diverse perspectives we have to offer — is by being authentic in the way we present ourselves. This means ensuring that our strengths (i.e. what makes us unique) and values are reflected in our brand.

What does this look like when executed? Keep reading.

Packaging our content differently for each platform:

In general, each distribution platform serves a purpose. Instagram is all about the visuals; Twitter is about staying on top of current events and connecting with like-minded people; and Facebook is our primary publishing platform — that’s where people go to watch our documentaries in their entirety. To increase engagement in each, we need to ask ourselves how people are consuming content on those platforms and package our own content accordingly (even if it means losing the 360-degree/virtual reality aspect, which is what made our particular mode of storytelling unique).

This is the part of the distribution plan that had us scratching our heads, because we are now working with multiple parameters: we needed to tailor our content for each distribution platform, while also ensuring our unique values, visual style and voice are preserved.

Let’s break it down by the value and platform that would help us achieve that best:

1. STORYTELLING: Contrast is a storytelling studio, yet we weren’t doing any kind of storytelling on our social media pages. We weren’t doing justice to the stories we covered in our documentaries, because we were using our social media accounts to promote our work in singular posts (posts that usually consisted of single images, which were lackluster compared to the stunning footage we captured in our virtual reality documentaries). Our posts also didn’t carry the nuance or richness of the characters and issues that were the focus of our documentaries.

PLATFORM OF CHOICE: INSTAGRAM

It makes the most sense to do most of our storytelling on Instagram, where people come to see great visuals, rather than read blocks of text. But, how do we adapt the stories and content covered in our virtual reality documentaries, so that they’re just as stunning and engaging in linear form?

1. BY TELLING A WEEKLY STORY: We’re going to tell a different story every week using images, cellphone footage and graphics, using our social videos and documentaries as a focus. The stories we tell weekly will be unified by a common monthly theme i.e. we will have a new theme every month and we will tell four different stories within the month that reflect the theme. This will hopefully establish a consistent narrative that people have a reason to follow.
2. BY EMBRACING THE ‘GRID’ look: Instead of publishing our film posters (which are always colourful and powerful) as a single post, we’ll publish each in a grid format, to maximize the visual appeal.
3. BY INCORPORATING DIFFERENT KINDS OF MEDIA: During our production shoots, we collect images, cellphone footage and audio, in addition to 360 footage. In the past, we didn’t take advantage of this; now we plan to, making sure that the stories we tell in the VR documentaries are continued to be told using a diversity of mediums on different social platforms.

2. SUPPORTING DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES, LOCAL STORYTELLING AND BUILDING A COMMUNITY: Contrast is run by a team of all-women, who come from various parts of the world. As such, we have many different perspectives represented on our team, which is reflected in the stories we cover — from Pakistan’s female carpenters, to food waste in Brazil, to the impact of war on Yemeni children. We’ve actively involved local communities in the storytelling process (i.e. by hiring local filmmakers, journalists or photographers) to get more nuanced, diverse perspectives in our stories. Thus, we very much support local storytelling, and given that social media is where one can connect with millions of people, from all walks of life, and that there are ongoing discussions around diversity and representation in journalism, it is very important for us to be able to communicate — and demonstrate — this specific value to our audience.

PLATFORM OF CHOICE: INSTAGRAM

Instagram would be the best way to support and build a community that consists of those interested in local and diverse perspectives. We’ll tap into this by:

1. Regularly collaborating with accounts that have global contributors, particularly from the Global South
2. Regularly reposting photos taken by local journalists, filmmakers, artists etc.
3. Leaning on the freelancers we’ve worked with in the past to submit updates on the stories — and regions — they were involved in covering
4. Host Instagram takeovers with local storytellers from different parts of the world, based on our monthly theme

PLATFORM OF CHOICE: MEDIUM

Because we’ve involved local journalists, filmmakers and photographers on every documentary and social video we’ve published, we’ve already begun building a local storytelling community. As such, we regularly feature these storytellers on our Medium blog, where they share their experience of covering x-y-z from the perspective of their community. We also share our behind-the-scenes into the ins and outs of producing a documentary, from pre to post-production, which we hope many readers will find relevant. We also plan to regularly feature those who are shifting the narrative within their communities by doing ground-breaking work — work that many should know about and/or can learn from.

3. FORWARD-THINKING AND INTEREST IN EMERGING TECHNOLOGY: Virtual reality — and other emerging technology like augmented reality, artificial intelligence etc. that are being used for storytelling — are niche topics; not everyone is into these, and not everyone understands the tech. But, those who do tend to be very enthusiastic about its future and this is the audience that would be the easiest to engage. Thus, it’s important that we demonstrate our interest in new media and emerging technology, because this would be the best way to connect — and exchange ideas — with industry partners and leaders.

PLATFORM OF CHOICE: TWITTER

Twitter is the best way to establish Contrast as a thought leader in the niche industries that we belong to. Along with doing storytelling on Twitter, we use it to connect and share relevant information with like-minded people. Ultimately, we want our Twitter account to become the go-to source for news relating to the intersection of emerging technologies and storytelling, as well as upcoming immersive storytelling projects (particularly those incorporating diverse perspectives).

PLATFORM OF CHOICE: MEDIUM

Contrast was started in 2017, and in the last two years, we’ve experienced every glitch and mishap you can imagine during the pre and post-production process. Those tuned into the worlds of virtual reality and journalism will likely find our learnings — from how we’ve overcome these difficulties, to the shortcuts we’ve managed to find — very relevant and helpful. As such, we plan to publish more blog posts that cover ‘tips & tricks’ and ‘behind-the-scenes’, to not only begin to cement ourselves as thought leaders in the immersive storytelling arena, but also to connect with and feature other leaders as well.

Well, there you have it. Contrast’s rough plan to maximize engagement and build a loyal audience. I think the key here is being able to adapt our content in a way that preserves what made it unique in the first place and giving people a reason to keep coming back for more (telling stories week by week). We’ll check back in a few months with an update on whether this plan works or not!