Over the past decade, we've witnessed a growing shift in readership and advertising dollars from traditional media (print, radio, and broadcast TV) to online outlets. This year, when the Newspaper Association of America released the numbers on advertising expenditures for 2009, we gawked at the 27.2 percent decline in advertising from 2008. Over the past year or so, we've also chronicled how traditional media outlets are going social and using online video to engage new audiences.
Most recently, we've watched as news organizations discovered new revenue models to replace the losses they continue to face. The New York Times, for example, is set to introduce a paid model for content on nytimes.com starting in January 2011. While The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times already offer online subscriptions.
At Social Media Brasil, the largest social media conference in Brazil, I spoke about six social media tips for traditional media outlets looking to either initiate or evaluate their social media strategy. Each tip is general enough to apply to any news organization, but can be tailored to fit a particular company as well. Check out the embedded presentation below for an overview and read on for a more thorough look at each tip.
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1. Share Content
The first step to using social media effectively is sharing your content. Begin by taking an inventory of the type of content your company produces. It is important to be as efficient as possible in repurposing content. The idea is to promote the articles, videos and photos that you currently produce, instead of creating new content specifically for your social media presence.
If you are an online news site, you will have an endless feed of articles and blog posts, but you may also have an array of video and photo offerings. Once you have a grasp of all of the various types of media that your site produces, you're ready to take a look into which social media platforms may be best for you.
Most brands should start with Twitter and Facebook at a minimum. Both platforms can easily be set up for manual or automated updates. As a start, use these platforms for sharing links to your most recent articles or blog posts. If you also produce videos and photos make sure you share those too. For video producers, YouTube is an obvious option, as it's the most popular online video community in the world. Depending on the type of videos you produce, you may find a valid fit on Vimeo, Hulu and Blip.tv, among others. And for photos, Flickr is the go-to service. Just make sure you are following their terms of service, as brand promotion can be a touchy subject within the Flickr community.
Keep in mind that users react differently to various types of media. You've probably noticed this on your website, and it certainly applies to media posted on your social sites, as well. Diversifying your content can help you get a better idea of which type of content does best or promotes certain actions (comments, shares, click-throughs, etc.) on various social platforms. As a starter, test the grounds to see how your Facebook audience reacts to different types of posts, including status updates, photos and videos.
The New York Times does a great job of not only diversifying which platforms they are on, but also mixing up their content. You can find The Times on Facebook (where they have over 30 fan pages), Twitter (where they have over 200 feeds), YouTube, Vimeo, Foursquare and Flickr. Because they have a range of content types, they are able to serve up videos, photos, tips, discussion questions, and simple updates across the social sites that they are active on.
Figure out your audience's preferences and needs when it comes to frequency and timing. When posting, try not to overwhelm your audience with updates that are too frequent or lengthy, and make sure you're updating at times when your readers are most active. When it comes to timing, look at your audience's behavior patterns. When do they comment or click-through to your site most? If you plot out the number of comments and click-throughs by the hour for your Facebook page, you'll see a pattern. Concentrate your efforts in the hours where users are more active.
Lastly, keep your updates short. Get inspiration from Twitter's 140-character model. You have a limited amount of time to catch a reader's attention. Make it quick and include a link to the article or post. For keeping it as short as possible, use a shortened URL, using services like bit.ly or ow.ly.
2. Curate Conversations
Some brands look at social media as a way to simply promote their content. While it's a great way to promote media, it's so much more. When evaluating the effectiveness of your social media strategy, you should be able to at least answer one question: What value are we bringing to our audience?
In fact, you should be able to answer that question with every strategic business decision you make, above and beyond social media. If you can't answer that question or your answer seems a bit shallow, you should rethink your strategy.
Naturally, your audience craves the latest news, not just from you, but from around the web. It's not enough to simply self-promote, as eventually your audience will need to go elsewhere for news. It's impossible to create all the news, so why not curate it?
Strive to be the news source with the go-to list of top sources for particular coverage areas. Create Twitter lists for important topics in your industry, or for breaking news events. Many news sites, including The Huffington Post, CNN and the New York Daily News, are on the ball with Twitter lists. Check out Mashable's Twitter List Directory for a look at some of the top lists in specific categories, including Tech & Science, Sports and Business.
Once you have the hang of Twitter Lists, try pulling the data into a visualization on your website. For example, The New York Times features its curated lists on nytimes.com/twitter. And on Mashable, we integrate an entire Twitter List Directory within our site. Take inspiration from these curation ideas and brainstorm how your site could begin implementing valuable resources like these.
Another way to curate news is to share breaking news and interesting articles from other news sources on your social sites, giving appropriate credit, including @mentions on Twitter and Facebook. After all, what's more important: providing your followers with a timely update or waiting until your writers have a post on the story? Once again, it's about creating value for your fans and followers.
3. Engage Audiences
It's important that traditional media outlets continue to push the envelope and strive for true audience engagement by asking and answering questions. It is human nature to answer a question when it is posed, so start asking questions with each of your posts and see what type of feedback you get. Most likely, users will be intrigued to answer your questions and add their opinion, especially if they feel that you truly care. A few media outlets have realized that questions lead to responses. On Facebook, CNN seems to make it a point to ask a question with posts that may elicit widespread response. With nearly a million fans, they seem to be doing something right.
Read through user comments and respond to particularly insightful ones. Most news sites already do this on their websites, especially if they employ a comment moderation team. It's strange that this type of interaction hasn't already been fully translated into the social world. This type of engagement is a good step in the right direction.
4. Promote Your Presence
Just like all brand initiatives, social media campaigns and strategies need to be promoted. Often times, brands entering the social media space have the Field of Dreams misconception, "If you build it, they will come." Unfortunately, social media doesn't work that way. You have to put time and effort into building an audience.
Think about the ways you currently promote house projects. You probably have a mix of web, mobile, e-mail and social media marketing options set aside for house advertising. Don't forget to take advantage of these promotion opportunities. On-site opportunities include embedding buttons, links, and widgets to promote your presence, as well as building micro-sites to showcase your full social presence.
Click through my embedded presentation above for a full section on promotion examples. The promotion section of my presentation was the heftiest, as I feel that this is the area that most traditional media companies are lacking. Because a lot of brands have seemed a bit uncomfortable with the social space, they have been reluctant to promote, in order to reduce liabilities and possibly embarrassment. Now that they are warming up, media companies should begin to see the wonderful advertising opportunities available. If you build it and promote it, they will come.
5. Customize the Experience
Every social site comes with a set of defaults -- make it your practice to know the options and customize as necessary. Deviating from the defaults makes your profiles appear to be more professional and allows you to create a cohesive look and feel across social platforms.
Start with avatars, backgrounds and layouts. ESPN, for example, recently had a World Cup theme on its YouTube channel to tie into this year's biggest sporting event. It was a simple customization, but it got the point across that ESPN planned to dedicate the channel to World Cup news during the event.
Once you have a custom appearance, look into creating a custom user experience. Are there apps or features that you can implement for added value? As a starter, brainstorms ways that you may be able to add customized Facebook Tabs to your profile using apps that your readers would find useful.
6. Track Everything
No matter where you are in implementing a social media strategy, tracking should be a priority. Without analytics, you cannot make informed decisions. With proper tracking though, you'll be able to decide what type of content does best on certain social platforms. Furthermore, if you're incredibly motivated, you even have the opportunity to monitor optimal conditions down to the smallest details, such as time of day, day of week, length of post, type of post, and even the topic of the post.
For starters, try using the options that come built-in to each social site. Some are free, such as Facebook Insights, while others come with paid accounts, including Flickr Stats and Vimeo Plus Stats. If you are a copyright holder on YouTube, you can even try the YouTube Content Manager, which includes lots of data on video performance.
When sharing links, make sure you use a URL shortener that counts clicks. Use the dashboard on bit.ly, for example, for a quick pulse on which links are doing best, but add on your own tracking codes for better analytics. Many Twitter clients, such as Hootsuite, CoTweet and Seesmic come equipped with or can be configured to accommodate a URL shortener.
If you already track using the built-in options and find them to be lacking, you may want to explore social media management tools, such as Radian6, Postling, Vitrue and SocialTALK. These are all enterprise-level tools built specifically for brand management on the social web.
If your analytics team is up for pitching in, consider creating your own customized tracking system, integrated with your current site analytics. Some common web analytics tools include Webtrends, Coremetrics and Omniture. Most large companies use one of these analytics tools, and all three already offer some type of social media analytics. But most likely, these products will need to be tweaked to fit your needs. Luckily, most social sites offer an API, so that developers can built off of data. Make sure your developers have access to and are well versed in the APIs for social sites that your company uses. Meet periodically to explain needs and brainstorm solutions.
Your Tips
Everyone has an opinion, and we would like to hear yours. What are your social media tips for traditional media companies? Let us know in the comments below.
More Social Media Resources From Mashable:
- Why Social Experience is the Future of Online Content
- 5 Ways to Build a Loyal Audience on YouTube
- How Real Estate Pros are Using Social Media for Real Results