Social Media Strategy

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American City Business Journals

Creating a company-wide social media strategy

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As the Director of Social Media at American City Business Journals, I was tasked with creating a strategy to increase social media engagements and referral traffic from the social media channels for the company's 43 news publications. This was a bit tricky because all of ACBJ's content is behind a paywall, which limits the audience. However, shortly after being hired, I: 
 

• spent two months auditing the social media accounts of all 43 publications. This included an in-depth look at each newsroom's social media analytics, interviewing the social media managers and publication editors about their social media practices and workflow, and creating comprehensive reports to capture the internal landscape for leadership.

• created a detailed social media strategy document for all social media managers, both at the national and market levels, to follow. 

• led company-wide training on how to execute the new social media strategy.

• traveled to newsrooms to help staff implement the strategy and tweak it for their audiences.

• published detailed monthly reports showing company-wide and market-by-market progress.

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The result:

Within the first year of implementing this strategy, ACBJ saw a 96.3% increase in social media referral traffic. The number of engagements on social media posts increased each year, and newsroom staff became much more invested in using social media for reporting and story promotion.

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NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Informing strategy using the Facebook Content Testing Tool
 

Content Types: In February 2019, I used Facebook's content testing tool to run a six-week test to determine what type of content the NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune Facebook audience was consuming the most between midnight and 3 a.m. Every day, we scheduled sports, entertainment, opinion, crime, business, politics and education articles to run against one another during that time slot.

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Over the course of six weeks, we saw that while the number of engagements on our page did not increase significantly when sharing posts during this time period, we did see a high number of link clicks when we shared opinion columns. We began scheduling opinion pieces to go out during those early morning hours, which in turn noticeably increased our Facebook referral traffic. 

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A/B Testing: After noticing many news outlets sharing graphics and videos in a square format, I decided to use Facebook's Content Testing Tool to A/B test social media videos and graphics in various formats. For two months, my team created two versions of each social graphic and video. In version A, the graphic/video was square. In version B, the graphic/video was horizontal. Every time we shared one of these pieces, we shared it through the Content Testing Tool. 

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At the end of the testing period, we determined that horizontal graphics and videos consistently outperformed the square versions, even though square graphics and videos were trendier among competitors. We shared our data and observations with the national social media team at Advance Local, our parent company, who then asked us to share it with the social media editors of the other Advance Local publications. This practice was largely adopted by the other publications.

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NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

A Fragile State: ‘Donna’s Law’ could save Louisiana families from heartache

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When we published the series "A Fragile State," which details how Louisiana's health care system is failing its most vulnerable residents, I wanted to present it on social media in a way that made the stories relatable and easily digestible. The content is emotionally heavy, and the series is made up of 22 articles that discuss every part of the healthcare system and the people it affects.

 

I created a social media strategy for this series that highlighted key people and issues from the series. One piece that we focused on for social media was ‘Donna’s Law’ could save Louisiana families from heartache.

For this story, I:

• pitched a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the story's main subject, Katrina Brees, about how she's advocated for a "no-guns" self-registry after her mentally ill mother killed herself with a gun. The AMA received 2,600 up-votes, generated 837 comments, was given Reddit Gold and Reddit Silver, and resulted in dozens of users direct messaging our account for more information and to share their own stories. The AMA also served to expose the story to a much larger audience outside of Louisiana, and increased the social media referral traffic back to series.

• used our photographer's photos to create an Instagram story, which tells the story of Katrina Brees and asks viewers to swipe up to read more. The Instagram story had more than 40,000 impressions, a completion rate of 65.9%, a 4.9% reach rate, and more than 1,600 tap backs. 

• assigned social producers to create quote cards to share the story with on Facebook and Twitter. 

• created a detailed social sharing plan using an Excel sheet to keep track of when and where the story was being shared, and to ensure it got promotion both upon and after publication.  

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