Juggling two languages to reach all our readers

In an online world, every word matters when trying to reach readers via search. But what if you’re dealing with two languages at once? Dion Jones, from the Daily Post in North Wales, picks up the story….
It’s a problem that’s pretty unique to Wales, given our bilingual status, and one that we often have to take into account when dealing with content in the newsroom.
How do we try and capitalise on content when half of our audience will be Welsh speakers, while the other are mostly apathetic?
This is an issue we’ve had to wrestle with at times, none more so than during the National Eisteddfod for Wales.
For those of you who don’t know, the National Eisteddfod is a huge festival held every year to celebrate the culture and language of Wales. You don’t have to speak Welsh in order to enjoy the Eisteddfod but it helps — a lot.
This festival is extremely popular with certain sections of our audience. During the festival, some towns and villages in counties such as Anglesey and Gwynedd are virtually abandoned as its residents decamp for the Eisteddfod site.
However, the further east from Llandudno you go, the Eisteddfod generally becomes a more alien concept and in towns like Rhyl and Prestatyn, you’d struggle to find someone to talk to you about it on the street.
As a brand and a region, we’ve covered the Eisteddfod for years sending a correspondent and a photographer down to the event wherever it may be (it alternates between sites in the north and the south every year — a veritable travelling circus of Welsh culture).
However, getting people to engage with Eisteddfod content online has been a challenge, especially on Facebook.
From what I could remember in previous years, post relating to the Eisteddfod would massively underperform which often left us in a difficult situation. Post too much about the event and it would hammer our reach, post too little and we’d get the usual flurry of messages bemoaning our lack of support for the festival.
PROBLEMS
Our chief reporter Eryl Crump and photographer Arwyn Roberts are Eisteddfod veterans having covered the events for many years.
They also have a vast circle of friends on their own Facebook accounts that attend and are involved with the Eisteddfod.
The idea was to get them to add their ‘friends’ to the group manually to get the ball rolling.
Easy quick win right?
Well, thanks to some sort of glitch within the group, this never happened. Despite adding and removing our group admins several times over they were unable to add people to the group manually (thanks Facebook). To group the group, we knew we had to put the work in populate it.
NATIVES
We tasked Eryl and Arwyn to flood the group with any native pictures and video they captured from ‘The Maes’ (the main staging area of the Eisteddfod).

Given their hectic schedule, they could only do this in the brief time they had before press conference, events and competitions.
However, they really went for it and the results were great. Barely a few hours went by when the Eryl and Arwyn didn’t post some sort of candid native image from the ‘Maes’ to the group and people responded positively to it.
We also gave the group a plug on the main account during the first day of the Eisteddfod which gave us a good start. The group also gave us a platform to promote our Eisteddfod coverage — roughly three published items a day (helped in part by some off-colour remarks made by high ranking Eisteddfod officials this year)

Reaction
So this is how the group grew over the course of the festival — there’s a sharp rise mid week when people started to discover it.

We also had some praise on the group itself for setting it up — like this one which reads ‘Thanks to the Daily Post for all your coverage and pictures from the Eisteddfod in Cardiff’

Was it worth it?
In short yes. It took little effort to set up the group and the staff on the ground did a great job of populating it with content. It was a good for us as a brand to show our support for an event celebrating Welsh culture while also maintaining our health on the main Facebook account.
Had we actually been able to add people to the group manually, I’m sure we would have had over 1,000 members by the time the festival came to a close.
In fact, that was the main comments that Arwyn and Eryl received on the Maes when they spoke about it — people didn’t know about the group. For next year’s event, we’ll be sure to shout about the group from the rooftops!
What’s more, the progress we’ve made with this group won’t go to waste. Next year’s Eisteddfod will be held in Llanrwst — part of the heartland of the Welsh language — and it’s going to be a big one. Between now and then there will be a host of events to drum up support for it which we will no doubt use to grow the group.
We are also planning on setting one up for the Urdd Eisteddfod — a youth version of the national — in the hope of engaging with a younger demographic with an interest in this event.







