Cosmo and Lad Bible reach new audiences through social
Nobody owns the audience, Facebook will change the rules of publisher engagement to suit its needs and the benefits of using social platforms controlled by others outweigh the disadvantages.
Those were the key takeaways from four publishers speaking on the first day of the 2016 Guardian Changing Media Summit. The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, the Guardian and The Lad Bible shared their experiences of using social channels to widen distribution and find new audiences.
Each highlighted one key social project.
The Lad Bible has just launched an Instagram-only community aimed at budding photographers. Less than a month after launch the Lens Bible has more than 139,000 followers, nearly half the number of the Getty Images Instagram account. “There are two billion smartphones in the world,” says Mimi Turner, marketing director at The Lad Bible, “that’s two billion connected cameras. If you have an agile mindset, it becomes logical to create communities at that scale.”
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Asked how The Lad Bible intended to make money out of this audience, Turner said it would “take the long view”, noting: “There’s only one commodity that works and that’s attention – did I get your attention or didn’t I get your attention? That’s a very nice place to monetise an audience.”
The Guardian is experimenting with Facebook Instant Articles. It is testing not just traffic and readership levels – which so far remain unchanged – but the content mix too. “Facebook has guidelines about what can and can’t be published,” explained Mary Hamilton, executive editor of audience at the Guardian. “When things are published on Facebook we have to think hard about the legal implications – if we publish a sensitive story [this means] making sure comments aren’t accessible on Facebook’s platform.”
“There are other benefits of playing Facebook’s ecosystem,” she said. “As we move towards a membership proposition, getting to reach people who might become members is a much more strategically important goal for us.”
The Washington Post is deep in Facebook Instant Articles experimentation too. Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at the newspaper, noted that his team had intended to promote only a selection of Washington Post articles but proprietor and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos cautioned against “cherry picking” the best articles – commit to the experiment, he counselled.
So now the Post publishes 1,200 articles a day to Facebook, the same number that are published to its own sites and apps. This offers direct comparisons of access speeds, engagement and article-by-article traffic. The initial results, said Gilbert, are “dramatically positive” – an uplift in the number of people coming more than once a week and greater dwell times per article.
Another important insight from Gilbert’s experimentation is the “interrelation between channels”. When the Post questioned the relative merits of using Twitter – 320-million active users per month – compared to Facebook – 1.59 billion active users – it examined the natural origin of its Facebook posts and shares. “The headwaters of those shares was often Twitter,” Gilbert said. “Twitter is driving people to share on Facebook.”
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Cosmopolitan launched a Snapchat Discover channel in the UK last September and the results, said the publication’s editor, Farrah Storr, have “knocked us for six”. Engagement is high: three quarters of users complete a series of 14 snaps each day while 56% of users return five days in every six.
So is it about conversion or marketing? “It’s about both,” said Storr. “There will be people on Snapchat who are 14, 15, 16 and their first interaction with the magazine will be on Snapchat. And that’s great.” Although Snapchat refuses to share data that might help demonstrate conversion, Storr believes there is a crossover between social media activity and print sales.
That Snapchat is reluctant to share numbers with its Discover partners – and last year threw Yahoo! off its programme – is indicative of the control these platforms exert.
There are three reasons, at least, why publishers might think twice about putting their faith in third parties. The first is the lack of transparency around demographic information that is strategically important to publishers who want to grow audience engagement and revenues. It is one of the main reasons that the Financial Times left Apple’s app store back in 2011 and it remains an issue today. Second, revenue generated on third-party platforms will always be lower than on owned sites.
Third, publishers are at the whim of the platform owners. “Does anybody remember four years ago when we were all into frictionless sharing and Facebook apps,” Hamilton asked the summit audience. “And we’re not into that anymore because Facebook basically turned all the dials down on the distribution so low so nobody could make any traffic out of it or any money. That’s Facebook’s deal and they will do what they think their users want.”
So does it matter? All four publishers suggested that the upside of platform experimentation and partnership outweighed the downside. “We are sharing their audience,” said Storr. “The beauty of Snapchat – working off someone else’s platform – is they make money, we make money and we still have editorial control over what we put out.”
Jon Bernstein is an independent digital media consultant, editor and writer, formerly deputy editor, then digital director of New Statesman and multimedia editor at Channel 4 News. He tweets @jon_bernstein
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