Are Your Readers Leaving Your Site Faster than a Bad Date?
When we first started the LivePost blog (http://blog.livepost.news), our strategy was just like many other sites out there. We posted short news, just bits of information with a paragraph or two, to keep our readers updated on politics, breaking news, technology and a couple of breaking entertainment stories. We thought we were doing OK because that’s what media blogs are about, right? Well, according to Analytics we were wrong.
Turns out our readers didn’t stay long on our site, most of them hanged for less than a minute and then left. We knew we could do something about it, so we decided to change the game — and by “game” I mean our content strategy — to present the news in a way that would keep our readers engaged for much longer. We decided to eat our own dog food and use LivePost for every story we covered.
We chose precisely this week to cover as many news stories as we could with LivePost. And what a week it was! From the evacuation of eastern Aleppo to the assassination of Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov, and the horrible tragedy in Berlin, we definitely kept our hands full covering everything that happened around the world. Luckily, LivePost allowed us to keep updating each of the stories directly from our phones, so we could upload content anywhere, anytime.
The result? Our stories got an average time on site of 8.5 minutes!
Covering the news in a live blog format definitely captured our readers’ attention. By doing this little experiment we also found out that people not only stayed on our stories longer, but they interacted with the content a lot too. Between people looking at our photos, watching our videos, or just clicking on some of the links we shared, we had an average engagement rate of 113%.(If you’re not sure how much that is, trust us, it’s a lot).
This strategy got us thinking that the way we tell and consume news needs to change. Having a LivePost story for every event that happened throughout the week allowed us to keep our audience updated as hours and days passed by, making it easier for readers to find and understand what was happening. Instead of browsing through hundreds of articles they could just come back to the same story and browse through the latest updates.
We plan on sticking to this strategy and you should try it to. If you want to check out LivePost you can download it here: http://bit.ly/LivePostApp
