Why your newsroom needs to take WhatsApp seriously… now
By Natalie Fahy, digital editor, NottinghamshireLive
Why would you bother sending out your news headlines on WhatsApp?
That’s where everyone shares the news they don’t want all the randoms to see on Facebook.
And that’s the point. Our audience is there — on WhatsApp.
We’re all in some group or other nowadays. Whether it’s for work, with family, best friends or a group for an upcoming event like a wedding, the WhatsApp group is the way to chat and share. People seem to trust it — they send a message and get a reply. You know when someone’s seen it or not. It’s all rather civilised.
Two years ago, we noticed this in the Nottinghamshire Live newsroom.
No longer beset by rumours that you’d have to pay to use it (remember that?), WhatsApp had slowly become the app of choice for keeping in touch. Everyone was in groups, chatting, sharing and enjoying their privacy, and we knew we had to be on that platform too.
It seemed to be the dream: no algorithm to contend with, no shouting through the noise on a fast moving timeline, no pressure to get the perfect picture — this was social media back to basics.
One simple message, three top stories, once a day, at teatime.
The service grew quickly and immediately we knew we were onto something that people seemed to like. We promoted it — and still do — with a blob of text at the bottom of stories, asking people to text the word ‘NEWS’ to our newsroom mobile phone — which back then was a spare old Blackberry from the bottom of a cupboard.
Things have moved on a bit since then. We started using the service as a way to push out our What’s On-type content. But, tracking the links through Bitly, we realised people were actually far more likely to click on solid, hard news. We experimented a bit more with breaking alerts, being careful not to spam people with too many, and these went down even better.
As our service grew in size, the old Blackberry we’d been using began to feel the strain. Now at around 3,500 subscribers, we upgraded to a new 32gb Samsung model, transferred the subscribers over, and were immediately able to complete the messages much faster, and provide breaking alerts in a more timely fashion.
The job of sending out the messages doesn’t just lie with one person in the newsroom either. There’s at least five people who can do it, so we make sure we never miss a day and we send it at the same time every day.
So how does it all actually work?
This is the question we get asked the most. And it’s all really straightforward. The sending of the messages requires you to be running WhatsApp Web on a computer — no-one wants to be typing messages out on a mobile phone keyboard.
We write the message in a document and then copy and paste it into a broadcast list before sending it out. There are 13 broadcast lists, each one with around 256 members. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes from start to finish.
The broadcast lists are the key difference between our service and the group you’re in with your best friends from school. No-one can see anyone else’s number or details in the list, they only see what you send them, but it does appear as a normal message when they receive it. Readers can reply to you, and you can chat, but they can’t see other people in the list. In light of GDPR, it’s important newsrooms set their service up like this.
Similarly when people subscribe to our service, we save them as a number in the phone and add them to the list that way. Again, to avoid any data protection issues.
As I mentioned earlier, we track our click-through rate using Bitly.
On an average day, we see a click through of around 30% on our messages, but some of the pieces of content we push out are achieving a much higher rate than that. A breaking news alert about a manhunt with armed police and a helicopter achieved a click through of 151% — news that had obviously been shared out by subscribers to the service.
Generally, the fresher the news, the more successful it is.
If something has been on our site all day, it does not perform well in the WhatsApp message, no matter how great a story it is. This suggests that this group of people are our most loyal readers. They’ve been on the site in the morning and checked the top stories there. Then they want the fresh, just published news in their WhatsApp in the afternoon. They’ve had to go to the effort of texting the words ‘NEWS’ to our number, then adding the number to their contacts. That’s a lot to ask of a reader who’s used to having news served to them on a Facebook feed, giving it a ‘lazy like’ as they scroll on by.
So, yes, a WhatsApp service is worth the effort. We’re nurturing our most loyal readers and giving them our news on the platform they’re already on in an easy to digest format. We’ve seen steady growth here and as the algorithm changes week in, week out, on Facebook, it’s nice to get over to WhatsApp and send your news straight onto people’s homescreens.
