Getting engaged
Trying to boost engagement on the Facebook site of a Non-Profit can be hard. It’s all about communicating your strategy and asking yourself the key question: Why would some share this?
As social journalists, we want readers to get engaged. In our social media tools-class at CUNY’s Gradschool of Journalism, we are trying to get people engaged by posting content their readers care about. It’s an in-class project a class where we are learning more about Social Media Tools, and after the first weeks of experimenting, but getting likes and shares is not as easy as it might seem.
First of all, what people like does not always correspond with what your editor (in our case the NGOs) like to see on their Facebook walls. So we need to have a strategy. You need to be able to explain why you post what you post, to communicate the strategy to your editors in order to get their support, and to show them some statistics of what works and what does not.
But how do we measure if a post was successful? On Facebook, we are trying to get likes and shares, if someone comments under our posts, it’s like a high five, if someone tags someone in his or her comment, it’s like a high ten. But to get there, we must ask ourselves: Why would someone share that?
Though likes and shares are nice, we shouldn’t be tricked by Facebook’s “reach”. It tells you nothing about actual engagement time, the time someone spends with the posted article or video, and we know that many people actually don’t read what they share: Most stories receive an average of under 45 seconds of engaged time per pageview.
Even though social media tools must be explored on a trial-and-error-basis and what works for one site might not work for an other site, it is always a good idea is to try to learn from examples of best practice.
Last year’s most-read article received was The Atlantic’s What ISIS Really Wants: It got as much audience as many popular movies, and in terms of metrics this means: It accrued more Total Engaged Time than the other 164 million which were pages published across the Chartbeat network in 2015.
So what can we learn from that? First of all, never underestimate the power of good, well-researched and well-written, journalism. But there is more to it: The story’s launch was thought-through and carefully done, and there was a clear social and publicity strategy behind it. Some of the lessons learned are:
- A lot of traffic can come from Facebook, and it has a capability for generating massive spikes like no other social media platform
- Search engine placement makes sense
- Forget what you’ve heard about short articles being better for online. If the story is good readers are willig and happy to read long pieces on all devices
Of course, in the case of our small projects of hosting NGO’s sites, our capabilities are limited, e.g. we can’t put money into boosting Facebook posts. But in the case of our NGO the last point — long reads are not nesecarily a turn-off — has already been proven to be right: Thomas Page McBee’s article Why Men Fight was — compared to the site’s average engagement rates — super successful (more than 400 likes, a comment, a tag, and 3 likes).
After the first week weeks working with the Venture Out Project we have learned that it is not only essential to communicate your strategy, but to get a feeling for your audience and community and what they want to read and learn about. This takes some time. Yesterday, we posted this article about a queer ranger and it has gotten a sky-high and, for this site, record-braking engagement: Almost 30 likes, and a reach of 1.200 users. But no shares so far. We have to ask ourselves, over and over again: Why would someone share this . . . ?
