Engagement: Keeping It Short and Simple
State of Digital Publishing
A new publication and community for digital media and publishing professionals, in new media and technology.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
By?Andrew Kemp, Managing Editor at SODP
Between information abundance and falling attention spans, how should publishers prepare to engage future audiences?
This is a pressing question as technologically driven changes in media habits become increasingly apparent.
Social media and mobile devices now deliver an endless buffet of bite-sized content, leading users to compulsively scroll through their feeds for hours.
Many publishers simply don’t have a plan to cater to “grazers”, who are challenging long-held industry notions of what readers want from content. And the tools publishers have relied on to identify website performance issues can’t pinpoint engagement issues at a foundational level.
Two US academics’ study on engaged journalism — a decades-old concept that advocates for news outlets to consult with audiences on story coverage to foster greater engagement — underscores this challenge.
The six-month experiment, published in July, involved 20 local news sites in the US of varying sizes, with half serving as the control group. The 10 participating newsrooms asked their audiences to submit questions for coverage, which they then put to a public vote, with the winning question reported on.
The study’s authors — Professor Natalie Jomini Stroud at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Professor Emily Van Duyn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — found that while involving audiences created an uptick in new subscriptions, newsrooms saw no impact on their subscription renewals, pageviews or return visits.
The results showed that while engaged journalism can convert anonymous audiences into paying customers, it won’t necessarily improve subscriber churn rates or engagement levels.
The results surprised me at first before I considered that audience consumption patterns have shifted significantly since the concept of engaged journalism first appeared in the 1990s under the title public journalism.
MASTERING CONTENT ENGAGEMENT: KEY METRICS AND STRATEGIES
Publisher success boils down to attracting, keeping and growing audience numbers. And that depends on producing killer content.
The publishing world is incredibly competitive, with audiences demanding to be wowed with each piece of new content. Successful content must be visible, memorable and shareable to stand a chance in an increasingly crowded content arena. Every new piece needs a catchy headline, stellar SEO, eye-grabbing visuals and compelling storytelling.
This makes content engagement a critical metric to understand, given that it defines how effective publishers are connecting with their audiences. Let’s take a closer look at the vital elements of content engagement, dissecting what it means, the best ways to measure it and techniques to enhance it.
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USER-GENERATED CONTENT: TIPS FOR PUBLISHERS
User-generated content (UGC) is anything — text, images, videos or reviews — an audience creates in direct response to a publisher or brand’s content, service or product.
When a user creates content about a particular story or blog, they are free to share their thoughts and opinions about it through various forms of media. These posts and shares can either strengthen or weaken a publisher.
The difference between UGC and traditional content marketing campaigns is that publishers and brands have less control over the content. But the rewards for that lack of control are plain, with 92% of consumers saying they trust earned media more than any other form of advertising.
Publishers can use UGC to enhance their content offerings, engage their target audience and promote a stronger sense of community. They may even incorporate it into their evergreen content strategy.
PUBLISHERS' GUIDE TO EVERGREEN CONTENT
Every digital publisher should be looking to create at least some content that drives website traffic for years with minimal upkeep.
Content creators know the challenges of creating content that attracts clicks, which makes evergreen content that continues to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) long after it’s published ever more valuable.
Ahrefs found that of the more than 2 million new web pages it studied, only 5.7% ranked in Google’s top 10 within a year. In other words, focusing on evergreen content is a crucial long-term content strategy for driving traffic, building an audience for less money and establishing topical authority.
Now, it’s all very well to say create high-value and optimized evergreen content, but the process can be challenging. Join us as we look at seven tips that can help any publisher create their own evergreen content and then leverage it to build a sustainable revenue stream while trimming time and resource commitments.