Best practices for newsrooms setting up social distribution partnerships
Newsrooms are discovering the benefits of working together to reach new audiences on social media.
What is a social distribution partnership?
Basically, it’s an agreement between two organizations to occasionally share/post each other’s content.
Why would publishers do this?
In an effort to bring new audiences to both publishers and to offer a different kind of content than each publisher can produce themselves.
Is this a common thing?
It’s becoming more common, especially in New York media circles. Vocativ, Quartz, Fusion and others have social partnerships.
Some places, like The Marshall Project, set up a different kind of relationship with advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center; the organization is alerted when The Marshall Project posts something that may be of interest to their audience. This gets the publisher’s content in front of new people, and also gives the advocacy group relevant content that they can then post and use to engage their audience.
Is it a lot of work?
It depends on the specifics of your partnership. A partnership can be as little work as once a month sharing one post from the publisher’s Facebook page on your Facebook page. They can be an informal verbal agreement or have a formal written agreement. Some partnerships can involve daily communication between the publishers.
OK, a few best practices:
Reach out to potential partners who either:
- Are interested in and cover the same topic area as you
- Don’t have anyone to cover your topic area but are interested in bringing in readers who care about that topic (For example — AJ+ doesn’t cover tech as in-depth as Vocativ, so it uses Vocativ’s tech coverage in a partnership to bring tech readers to AJ+. On the other side, AJ+ has stronger conflict-zone video than Vocativ, so Vocativ is able to benefit from sharing AJ+’s videos.)
Start partnerships slowly
Do a trial period (maybe two weeks, a month or a quarter) and then have both sides chat after that about what’s working, what isn’t, and whether to continue the partnership. Start at a low level of frequency and work your way up.
Many partnerships are metrics-driven, but not all
Talk up front about the goals for both publishers, and how you’ll be measuring whether the partnership is worthwhile. Is it just about upping your numbers? If so, which numbers? Facebook Likes, click-throughs?
Decide on how to share numbers.
Determine what metrics you would like the other publisher to share with you about how your posts perform, and how frequently and in what form they’ll share those metrics with you. Another option is to ask a partner to use a UTM tracking code when they share a link.
Examples of how to share metrics:
- End-of-week screen grab of Facebook analytics about a post.
- Exporting Twitter data, isolating the rows that pertain to your publisher, and sharing that spreadsheet.
- Just writing an email report with the key numbers.
It all depends on what’s the right balance between useful and least time-consuming.
Get a sense of what kind of content the other publisher is interested in.
Breaking news? Evergreen? Particular people, topics? Particular media (video, slideshows, text, graphics, etc.)? If you send them links (and potentially share copy) to use, send a few extras so they can choose what they think makes the most sense for their audience.
Determine a level and frequency of your cross-sharing.
There are different levels that make sense for different publishers. A few examples, from least-intense to most-intense:
- Lowest-level: Sharing a post made by the other organization, exactly as is, on your organization’s page, once a month.
You can crank up the intensity on this and any level by increasing to once a week, once a day, five times a day, etc., as makes sense for the amount of content both publishers are publishing and sharing.
- Mid-level: Writing your own introductory copy for a link to content by the other publisher. Adding a (via @PartnersNameHere) at the end of that intro copy.
- High-level: Uploading a video, graphic or photo to Facebook yourselves that the other publisher has sent to you, and including a credit linking back to the partner’s Facebook page or website in the intro copy.
- Highest-level: Beyond just social sharing, allowing the other publisher to publish your content on their own website, with credit and a link back to your site (of course). And then they share that on social. Example from New York Daily News and Vocativ.
Set a schedule, at least at first.
Will you email each other daily by 10 a.m. with a list of potential links to share? Or one email every Friday about big projects that you have coming up that you hope the other will watch for and share on their own? How often will you check in with each other?
Have a second contact person.
You might go on vacation. Or the other person might take a sick day. Or leave for a month on maternity leave. Keep each other in the loop, and have the contact info for one other person at the company on hand in case you have a question and can’t get ahold of your original contact. Even if all that second person can do is say “Yup, he left the company,” it’s still useful to have that contact.
Keep track of things.
Have a spreadsheet where you keep track of each time you post, what you post, when you post it, and how it does (by whatever metrics are important to you and your partner org). Either keep that document up to date with each post, automate it somehow, or set a calendar reminder for you to update it once a week/once a month. Also keep track of how often you see your partner org posting your stuff, and get in touch with them if it drops off (could be someone forgot, went on vacation, etc.), so just give a gentle nudge.
Have other best practices to add? Feel free to write a response or holler at me on Twitter: @JuliaJRH.
