Pillow talk: using social media to stimulate an argument

Ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you I like a good argument. Debating someone is fun, but creating a debate between others can be even better. The Economist’s debates website was one of the things that drew me to the job of assistant community editor. I started last September and, out of the million things I took on, the debates platform has been one of the closest to my heart.

There’s so much scope for a publication like The Economist to stimulate and host provocative and smart online debates. I’m not talking about rants below the line or party-political spats. I’m talking about debating ideas and principles. It’s the kind of thing people at The Economist do before breakfast.

So not long after I arrived I started to think about how to increase the number of people coming to one of our debates, and how to make them stick or keep them coming back. I’m still working that out, but the obvious place to start was with social media. The debates website should be a social platform: built as such and used as such. It’ll take a few upgrades before the structure works well for that (working on it!), but in the meantime I realised there’s a lot we could do just to bring people in.

The first is to pick a hot topic. For my first debate, a hot topic landed in my lap: in September we published some in-depth pieces about the state of the pornography industry and the debate about whether porn is harmful. These pieces spiked our traffic on social media. The topic was perfect for our online debate. I chose the question: Can porn be good for us?

I found a few contributors, including digital iconoclast Cindy Gallop and radical feminist Robert Jensen, to join in the debate. I found Helen Joyce, a senior editor for The Economist, to moderate the debate. I commissioned some eye-catching artwork. Most importantly, I began to prepare to promote the debate on social media. I turned the opening arguments into provocative tweets and asked people to join the debate (which they did by clicking on the link). I turned some of the contributors’ provocations into images using our red quote template, and posted this on Twitter and Facebook. When comments started coming in on social media platforms and our debates website, I curated the highlights and shared them with the contributors and moderator so they could choose some to respond to.

The debate was a success: it’s no surprise, but using social media to drive traffic meant that we got more than 13 times more votes and five times as many unique visitors as the previous debate. In total more than 11,000 people voted. I was really amazed to see this many people engaging with the debate — and I know it can only get better.

Although the debate enabled The Economist to be the site of the kind of ‘severe contest’ we were founded for, it had its drawbacks. They include:

• 10 days is far too long. This meant I had to keep assaulting our Twitter followers with tweets about porn, and some of them didn’t like it. Of course, it’s their problem if they don’t like serious discussion about one of the most popular and least-discussed forms of entertainment. But we are usually careful about not bombarding our followers with the same story too many times, and this should apply even if we’re trying to get people to come to the debate.
• Only one of the contributors was active on Twitter. This didn’t actually bias the debate — Cindy, the one with the big following, actually lost the debate, even though she doubtless brought lots of supporters with her. But in any case it’s a good idea to commission contributors who will do some of the heavy lifting to bring people in.
• I didn’t really use any platforms other than Twitter and Facebook to bring people in. It is on these networks that The Economist has its largest followings, but we’re also present on Tumblr, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and so on. What other platforms should I be using to find people who want to debate?

There are plenty more debates to be had, and I’ll be bringing these lessons to the next in the series. Ideas? Please comment below.

Adam Smith is The Economist’s deputy community editor.