How The Economist covered Brexit on social media

When quality needs a little help from quantity

It should not come as a shock to our followers that The Economist is not a breaking news organisation. We’re best known for weekly analysis — and that’s the reason why people pay to subscribe.

But in the era of social media, news travels fast. If you want to be part of the conversation, you need to be present when news breaks. Otherwise, people who know you may forget about you, and people who don’t know you may never stumble across you. The vast amount of news content that becomes instantly available online can even overwhelm me — and I’m a news junkie. Not everyone wants to wait a few days for a sophisticated piece of analysis, regardless of how perceptive it may be.

So Britain’s referendum on EU membership, a big news event, put us in a bit of a tricky situation: how could we ensure that we remained relevant, and part of the conversation? The answer was pretty straightforward. Social, social and some social on the side. And it worked: in the two months leading up to the Brexit vote, traffic to the Economist’s Britain section increased by nearly 70% compared with the two-month period earlier, even though we produced roughly the same amount of content. And on the day of the result, we had fewer pieces to promote than our competitors, but generated more social-media engagements per post than most other publishers, according to data from Shareablee, a social-media tracking firm.

One key to our success was promoting or re-surfacing analysis pieces at the right time. The potential of this approach was highlighted on February 20th, when David Cameron set the date of the referendum. This Facebook post for a recent article was scheduled to go out minutes before the announcement. It generated nearly three times the median engagement of a normal post, driving tens of thousands of readers to economist.com:

Our next tactic was to think about how social-only content could be coupled with archive material to complement our latest analysis pieces. Past articles (even dating back to Britain’s 1975 referendum), bespoke social-friendly formats (courtesy of our design team) and live videos on Facebook were among the content we produced.

As June 23rd neared, we started to promote our new and archive content more aggressively — from three posts a day on Twitter to one every hour. We put our referendum coverage in front of the paywall and re-packaged a series of articles that had appeared in the weekly print edition over the past few months into a free PDF, which proved very popular with our readers.

And then came the long night of the historic Brexit result. Thanks to our data and design teams, who set up a live results tracker, we could stay on the ball, even though we don’t usually break news. We wanted to make sure we remained audible during a noisy night, even though our analytical content wouldn’t arrive until the following day. I worked through the night, supported by editors, to make sure our results tracker was visible across our main social media channels. A Facebook post at the beginning of the count and regular live updates on Twitter through the early hours drove enormous amounts of traffic to economist.com throughout the night. We paused all other posts for at least 12 hours to make sure nothing irrelevant went out.

Our leader article, published on the morning when Britain was waking up to a brave new world, was one of our most shared posts of all time: on Facebook it reached 11m people and generated 56,000 likes.

This was not the referendum result we had advocated for, but the results on social media were at least a silver lining. In the week of the referendum our Brexit coverage was served to Facebook users 60m times; in the 28 days leading up to the vote, more than 8m people in Britain saw at least one Economist Facebook post. On Twitter, our fact cards and myth busters were retweeted thousands of times. And our five-episode Q&A series, which featured correspondents as well as our editor-in-chief deconstructing Brexit, reached on average 870,000 people, far above the reach of a normal video. In the week of the referendum, referrals from social media increased by 60%. We published 25 articles on Brexit in the four days after the vote. And on June 24th — the morning of the result — website traffic from social media was four times higher than on a typical Friday.

So, on the whole, our plan seems to have worked. But we can’t afford to be complacent. Our writers and editors may need the social-media geeks to help them to reach millions of existing and potential readers — but without their witty and sharp analysis in the first place, we have nothing to promote! Our experiences covering Brexit taught us the value of working closely with editors and correspondents to ensure we deliver both quality and quantity.

Loukia Gyftopoulou is a social media writer at The Economist.