Newsletters and Social Media Aren’t the Same — So Why Do So Many Marketers Treat Them That Way?

Better Strategies For Making Content Work Across Platforms

For most organizations, the process of integrating our newsletter content with social media is an exercise in box-checking.

Have we tweeted a link to our newest newsletter? Done. Have we added social icons to our newsletter so our audiences know where to find us? You bet. Have we posted on Facebook lately asking people to subscribe to our mailing list? Yep.

And then we hit send, or we check our social analytics…and we wonder why more people aren’t sharing our newsletter on social, or following us, or signing up for our list after being referred from Facebook.

The problem is that these baseline tactics for integrating newsletters and social are, at best, passive and ineffective. They’re a starting place, sure, but they’re not taking full advantage of what makes these channels unique — and what makes them work together so well.

Creative, selective points of integration between your newsletter and social channels can provide a much-needed boost to that terrific content you spent all week working on and sending out to your mailing list, only to have 25 percent of them see it.

They can open up your newsletter content to audiences outside your subscriber list — ones that behave and think like your current subscribers and thus are prime candidates to become advocates, members or supporters.

And, they can spark a sense of community among subscribers. How many of the mailing lists you subscribe to make you feel like a member of a true community? Probably not many.

So how do you fully exploit the relative strengths of each channel to expand reach, grow subscribers, give content a second chance, or build community?

Pay to Reach the Hard-to-Engage

I know, I know. I’m playing right into Facebook’s evil plans to eventually require every brand to pay for the content they post.

But paid social goes hand-in-hand with e-newsletters, because it allows you to take advantage of the treasure trove of data that already exists within your mailing list and use it to reach both current and potential subscribers.

Picture this: your newsletter goes out, and your open rates or click throughs are less than what you’d like. You can upload your subscriber list (or a segment of it — perhaps the ones who haven’t opened it, or ones who haven’t yet clicked on a particular link) to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, and target paid content from your newsletter to just those users for a relatively small budget. If you have an important advocacy action alert, or an announcement of a new white paper or industry resource, selectively boosting the content on social can be a good way to reach the hard-to-engage or yet-to-engage segments of your list.

Or, perhaps you’re looking to grow the size of your subscriber list. You can upload that same existing subscriber list and have Facebook create a “lookalike” audience that shares characteristics (think: prospective members, supporters, advocates) and then serve up paid content from the newsletter or sign-up promotions. Similarly, you could target potential subscribers yourself by identifying keywords, interests, or even — in the case of Twitter — other organizations they follow.

The key difference in integration strategies here is targeting.

You’re not just re-posting the same newsletter content to your broad social following and hoping that a bit more of your audience sees it the second time around. You’re choosing specific audiences that you want to act in specific ways.

Create Complementary Social Content

Email is a one-way channel, and your experience receiving it is singular. But that’s where social comes in: seeing others respond and react to content makes the experience communal.

I once heard The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg describe the purpose of Twitter as “to design a conversation that people are jealous they’re not a part of” — and this can be a powerful concept when applied to your newsletter. Create engaging conversations around your newsletter content that provide public validation of the value of the content for subscribers — and a sense of FOMO for those who don’t subscribe.

The Skimm does this exceptionally well. They pull out and visualize a single quote each day from the newsletter, and post it on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Note the difference here: they’re not just posting the text of the quote — they’re turning it into a visual, which we know works well on social.)

They created a #skimmlife hashtag, which readers use to post images of where they are and what they’re doing while reading that morning’s edition. Occasionally, they’ll post profiles of readers — usually celebrities, but there’s no reason why an organization couldn’t adopt this approach and use it to reward particularly engaged subscribers. (Again, the key here is that it’s visual.) And finally, they create interactive extensions of their content — contests and, most recently, “Skimm Libs” versions of their stories, which readers can print out, fill in, snap a photo of the filled in version and share on social.

Their strategy recognizes that, in the words of Shannan Bowen, National Journal’s Director of Audience Development and Member Engagement:

“Content happens in the newsletter, and engagement happens on social.”

The Skimm asks for engagement on the right channels, and tailors its content to be more engaging when posted natively. They’re not doing the same thing across both, but rather using them to complement one another.

Spotlight Social Sharing Opportunities

We often think about using social to boost our newsletter content, but not the reverse — using the newsletter to highlight great social content. While many newsletters feature the aforementioned passive calls for social engagement — icons that take you to the organization’s Facebook or Twitter or opportunities to share specific newsletter content on those platforms — the truth is that our audiences aren’t as comfortable working across platforms and need more of a push to actually follow through on those calls-to-action.

Pew Charitable Trusts’ bi-weekly environment newsletter regularly devotes prime real estate to big, visual previews of actual social content from Facebook or Twitter with the heading “Share that You Care.” Custom share buttons appear underneath, directing readers to the original post on social media where they can engage in a number of ways.

You can plainly see the payoff when social content is featured and repurposed like this. A post that appears on Pew Environment’s Facebook page a week prior sees a sudden surge in shares when the newsletter goes out. In an era in which our organic social audiences see maybe three percent of what we post, it’s a smart strategy to periodically give second (or third…or fourth…) chances to our best social content using our other channels.

Once you begin thinking more strategically about how to use the features and limitations of each distinct medium in your favor, you’ll see many other opportunities to target and tailor your content accordingly.

National Journal Communications Council delivers research and insights to Washington’s leading policy communications executives. Learn more at www.nationaljournal.com, and follow us on Twitter!