Trial, error and success on LinkedIn
How we learnt to listen to what our followers wanted
Many people would describe the average Economist reader as a man who is no longer young but is interested in business. They’d be partly right. The 45+ club is important to us, accounting for 63% of our total print readership. And we’re proud of the respect people have for our business and finance coverage.
Although much of our time on the social media team is spent searching for younger readers, and those who want to read beyond business and finance, we also want to ensure we keep reaching readers who are members of what might perhaps be considered our more traditional market.
In seeking these readers, we felt that LinkedIn would be a good place to start. According to the Pew Research Center, 32% of online adults aged 30-49 are LinkedIn users, compared with 22% of those aged 18-29. And 41% of LinkedIn users make over $75,000 a year. This crowd is deeply interested in business news. So we thought LinkedIn would be perfect for our content. We found this to be true in some respects — but we were also wrong.
When we started actively posting to LinkedIn in September last year, our initial strategy was a niche approach where we posted only content relating to business and finance. In December 2015 we had over 906,000 followers. By June 2016 we had gained an additional million, confirming our belief that users were hungry for—and would be satisfied with—our reporting and analysis of those topics.
But there was a hitch. As time went on, our follower growth-rate steadily declined, even though we had only just begun to penetrate LinkedIn’s 450m subscribers. We had to try something new. It was time to experiment.
In rethinking our strategy, we realised that we had forgotten that the professionals who read The Economist in print are not only interested in business and finance. They have a variety of interests. They depend on us to help them better understand political matters, cutting-edge trends in science and technology, and to keep them informed about arts and culture.
Our new strategy was premised on the belief that subscribers to LinkedIn and The Economist shared the same desire to be informed across a variety of fields, not simply business and finance. Limiting content on LinkedIn to business and finance also limited the followers we could attract. To increase our follower count, the content we served up on LinkedIn had to mirror the variety we offer in print and on the web.
In the end, we decided to copy the way our editorial colleagues pitch stories to each other for inclusion in the newspaper, and apply this to how we’d decide what to post on LinkedIn. Now, I understand the scepticism. Treating a social media platform like a newspaper? Isn’t that anachronistic? We gave it a shot.
First we produced a daily slate with a slot or “section” for every hour of the day. The plan was that and another social media writer and I would take on the role of ‘deputy editors’, and we’d pitch ideas to our colleague Adnan Sarwar, who’d be the ‘editor’. We didn’t just post articles either. We tried podcasts, video, charts, you name it. Whether you’re in Mumbai or London, Sydney or Bogota you get a hand-picked story on the hour, every hour.
Overhauling our strategy inevitably involved a lot of trial and error. For example, we started posting pieces on politics — something we’d avoided in the past — to see how our audience would react. A piece on John Kerry’s attempts to close a deal with Russia to end the violence in Syria did not do well. But a piece on what other countries feel about Brexit? Now that’s a different story.
Results were immediate. Followers increased to the rate of 1.5m people a year. At this rate, we’d reach 3m followers by June 2017. Our priority was growth. Gain more followers, celebrate with champagne, repeat. But we couldn’t stop there. After over a month of posting every hour, traffic hit a brick wall. We had officially entered the realm of diminishing returns.
So we decided to halve the number of daily posts from 24 to 12; one new post every two hours. We braced ourselves for a hit in follower uptake. But a funny thing happened. We didn’t see a drop in follower uptake. In fact, it started rising again. Why? Because providing the right content isn’t enough. You have to take advantage of the capacity for on an online platform (as opposed to a printed paper) to engage your followers.
That principle helped us extend the experiment. To date our most successful initiative has been “What do you think?”, a red template with a question linked to a piece from the newspaper. These posts generate an average of 117 comments. Our usual posts get 1–2 comments. We found that simpler questions, such as “What is the best language to learn?”, tend to drive more engagement than complex ones, such as “Is Abenomics working for Japan?” This is another example of identifying the desires of our audience through experimentation.
Over the course of a year, our strategy has evolved from “quantity” to “quantity and quality” to “quality over quantity”. More broadly, this evolution came from repeating these steps:
- Identify your target audience
- Don’t underestimate their interest
- Tailor your product to them
- Experiment, adjust, revise
- A method of working that works well for a print publication can be adapted for an online social network
We started out by assuming that what LinkedIn users were looking for was business and finance, all the time. What we didn’t realise was that we were looking at LinkedIn the way someone who’s never heard of The Economist thinks of us. “Oh, it’s for well-heeled business professionals. Posting our analysis of business and finance should be enough, right?” Actually, no.
Edmund Henry is a social media writer at The Economist.
