As a matter of fact
Driving Twitter engagement through #FactoftheDay
Fact: The Economist is renowned for the depth and detail of its reporting and analysis across a wide range of international topics. Our journalists seek to uncover the hard truths in every story. Striking facts, figures and examples are therefore essential — and in abundance throughout the newspaper. Our preference for liberal values, in both social and economic spheres, is clear, but facts underpin every ounce of our analysis.
On the social-media team our aim is to find the right ways to promote our analysis using the latest digital tools and platforms. We sometimes like to say we’re “teaching an 173-year-old to speak social”. We feel strongly that the kinds of facts our journalists unearth — clear, short and often surprising — should travel well across social media, carrying our work to more and more people with them.
A boost to engagement
But how can we better distribute our journalism to followers throughout the social realm without losing colour and context? How do we go beyond words, and employ other forms of media to captivate our followers and encourage them to share our work? And how can we use these intriguing nuggets of information as ambassadors for our editorial values of brevity, accuracy and insight?
To answer these questions, we’ve been experimenting with a number of social-only formats that encourage our followers to like and share our content. Our “On This Day” posts (OTDs) are one example of a successful, engaging format. To quote our resident historian and On This Day Queen Rachel Lloyd, “essentially if anything gets above 1,000 likes” then that’s good — and OTDs often do. Here’s a recent example:
Shares are just as important as likes. When people share our OTDs we’re able to reach more people beyond our existing followers; on Facebook, we find that typically 25% of people who like an OTD will share it. On Twitter this ratio tends to be far greater. All it takes is a striking quote and image within an aesthetically pleasing template, linked to a pegged archive piece. OTDs have been a major boon for The Economist. They highlight the breadth of our journalism and bring more eyes to our website.
Fact of the Day
Following the success of OTDs, we’ve been thinking about other creative ways to reach more people on Twitter. After much deliberation and many a scrapped idea, we arrived at something simple and, we hope, perfectly apt: The Economist’s Fact of the Day. Just as OTDs highlight our journalistic breadth, #FactoftheDay will draw attention to our undying commitment to interesting, unusual and informative nuggets of information. Each week we will scour each section, and the archive, for striking facts and statistics. We’ll tweet one a day — linked to an article — in one of our unfussy red images.
Unscientifically speaking, we divide these facts into two categories: “Hmm, that’s interesting” and “Wow, really?!” facts. We’re aiming for the latter. For example, everyone knows that stress is a psychological burden. But did you know that it’s an enormous economic burden as well?
Or perhaps you need facts for a more practical reason. Let’s say you’re planning a coup d’etat and would like to know your chances of success:
These fun and informative facts — “Wow, really?!”, if you will —emphasise our global, evidence-based approach, while simultaneously reminding the audience of the variety of our content. This aligns perfectly with our Twitter strategy, as well as our broader aim of adapting our journalism for social media. We also hope they’ll provide some of our followers with ice-breakers for casual dinner conversation, eradicating awkwardness the world over.
We’re hoping #FactoftheDay will work. We’ve started already. Once we have more data, we can track how this format performs relative to other experiments we’ve tried. If it can engage more readers with our journalism, we’ll deem it to be a success.
Archer Hill is social media writer at The Economist.
