About authors:

Clémence Petit-Perrot is the Children’s Radio Foundation’s Learning and Innovation Director. She oversees the development all new initiatives within the organisation. Part of her portfolio includes piloting technological solutions like WhatsApp to increase listeners engagement and measure the radio shows’ impact. Before joining CRF, she was the Southern Africa correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI). She also worked for the South African production company DOXA, producing social documentary films and leading a digitisation project of anti-Apartheid audiovisual archives.

Linda Daniels is a journalist by training and has worked in print, digital and broadcast media. She has reported on a range of issues, which include climate change, Intellectual Property and South African politics. Her work has appeared in local and international publications. Between 2013 and 2018, she worked at the Children’s Radio Foundation as the Radio Capacity Building Associate and managed the WhatsApp Integration project.

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[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WhatsApp-for-Radio-Toolkit.pdf” title=”Guide #6: WhatsApp for Radio Toolkit by Clémence Petit-Perrot and Linda Daniels”]

Bilton quotes Andrew Jack, head of aggregation and curated content at The Financial Times, which recently launched its latest daily newsletter, First FT: “There’s still a very strong appetite for email. People want something that’s always there and easy to access. It also gives us a way to push news and comments to readers in a new form.”

Benjamin Mullin of Poynter.org explains how effective email newsletters are proving for BuzzFeed: “so far in 2014 newsletter traffic to BuzzFeed is up 700 percent over 2013. And newsletters … are now in the ‘top five or six’ biggest drivers of traffic, behind sites including Facebook, Pinterest, Google and Twitter.” BuzzFeed now has 14 newsletters targeted at different audience segments.

While FirstFT aggregates articles from a variety of sources, not everyone agrees. Bilton gives an overview of four of the leading media newsletters.

Quartz: Daily Brief

• “We wanted the newsletter to feel like a personal email from a savvy, intelligent, well-connected person.”
• Aggregated sources
• 95,000 subscribers
• Sponsored and native ads

Vox: Sentences

• “Vox Sentences is the fastest way to get caught up on the most important news stories after a long day”
• Delivery: 8pm.
• Aggregated sources
• Banner ads

The Financial Times: FirstFT

• Morning briefing aimed at global decision-makers
• 50% FT sources, 50% external
• Some ads but goal is to drive FT subscriptions by building a relationship.

 Time.com: The Brief

• A daily snapshot of Time’s content to build the audience’s habit of using Time.
• Links to 12 Time stories, no aggregation
• 650,000 subscribers, with a 40 percent open rate.
• Carries ads and pushes readers to subscribe to its magazine.

The arrival of social networks has allowed for quick dissemination of content – in a few hours, articles can fly over the whole of the internet, and YouTube videos can have millions of views.

Social networks have become an important channel for news sites. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the way people consume news has changed. Readers suddenly don’t need to go to the home page of the news site – it’s enough to follow Facebook and news will come to them (either from friends or directly from the Facebook page of the media outlet).

Creating content with the potential to be shared a lot – if they want to keep their visitors – has thus become one of the most important missions of news-providing media. As has paying careful attention to their Facebook page. The key is to post the right statuses and keep in close contact with their readers.

The arrival of social networks, however, has also given news-providing websites one particular problem: creating viral content is not easy and cannot be made “on request” – sometimes it works, and sometimes it simply doesn’t. Similarly, not every article is popular on social networks and, as such, it doesn’t make sense to spread every text you write, but only some of them.

What kind of content do people like the most

What content do people like enough to share? What do they find to be the most fun? What type of content produced by news-providing sites works in the context of social networking?

Kristofer Mencak, a Swedish marketing specialist on viral content who has published books on the subject, has defined 12 indicators of virality. They include most of the viral content produced by news-providing sites.

Let’s look at them. You’ll probably find most of them familiar, but have you thought about them while you were posting a link to an article on Facebook?

Something funny – a large majority of content that goes viral falls into the funny category. In relation to news sites, the funny element works even better as it actually reflects real events “from real life”, which works much better than had the content been made up. A good example was an article “Married couple got high on a side dish” – three paragraphs describing how a couple exchanged marijuana for spinach received more than a thousand shares on Facebook and a few hundred thousand reads within a few hours.

Something wondrous – “The best example that the wondrous or miraculous works is the circus,” says Mencak. “Everyone wants to see something that is impossible” An example of such an article could be “Hero of the day – Captain Sully landed on river Hudson” about the miraculous maneuver performed by the American civilian airplane captain, who managed an emergency landing on the river, thus saving the lives of many people.

Something sexy – all tabloid themes with a sexual context, especially if they include something surprising, are also strong subjects. An example is the article, “Doctors say looking at busty women for 10 minutes a day is good for your health” on this tabloid site.

Something taboo – subjects people don’t like to talk about but think about a lot attract much attention. The more taboo a subject is, the more reactions it draws.

Secrecy – if something is secret, its price automatically increases regardless of whether the information itself has any value for the reader. Good examples are news articles containing secret documents or recordings such as documents published by WikiLeaks.org.

Something very personal – content which concerns specific groups of people – the information can be either personal in the right sense of the word or information that addresses them directly in another way. An example would be information about how an increase in taxation affects a certain category of earner.

Something controversial – if some social phenomenon draws different opinions, it usually spreads massively.

Something very current, with an uncertain outcome – in the case of sites providing news, this usually means informing about natural disasters, wars, coups and other significant events – especially if their outcome is uncertain.

American scientist Yury Lifshits in a study “Social analytics for online news” analyzed for Yahoo Labs what is read the most on news websites. In the study, he analysed the way the 45 biggest American sites share their content on social networks. “The 40 most-shared news items include much about lifestyle, photo galleries, interactive infographics, humour and relaxing reads. Four of the 40 most-shared articles are about current political affairs, three about celebrities. But the most popular are opinions and analyses,” says the study. According to Lifshits, the key is surprise. “Content that you can imagine someone emailing with either ‘Awesome!’ or ‘WTF?’ in the subject line gets spread”, the author says in Nieman Journalism Lab.

Four hints on how to make your Facebook page more interesting

Does your online news-site have a Facebook page? If so, here are four hints to attract more attention to your posts and thus more readers for your site:

• Choose well – don’t post too much, but choose articles suitable for social networks. You can see above which ones they are. Two to three posts per day are an acceptable maximum. Post more only in special circumstances (for example during elections, natural disasters – i.e. in times when people are more interested in getting information).
• Include a fun status – even if you are a serious news provider, be more personal and relaxed on social networks. This tip really works – try adding a bit of the funny and cool to your statuses and comments. Your credit won’t go down –on the contrary.
• Select content out of your website – do you have a great caricature? Don’t link to your website– post it directly as a photo. Do the same with video or a whole funny passage of your text. Are you worried that it won’t increase number of visits to your site? Perhaps not today, but a good picture will increase the reach of your page, so the next time you post a link, more people will read it.
• Don’t post yourself only – don’t be afraid to post links to other websites. Your readers want good content – they don’t mind that this time it’s not produced by you. If you give them good content, they will read your posts. Even those in which you promote yourself.

Three quick hints on how to reach more people by your Facebook posts

Until now, we have discussed mainly what kind of content is the most interesting, but very often the form is the key as well. Web page blog.bufferup.com summarized research about how to make your posts more attractive.

• Photo better than a status: A saying goes that it’s better to see once than to hear a thousand times. In translation to Facebook, it means that according to statistics, photos receive 53% more likes than comments and have a 84% higher click-through rate than text posts. If you can tell something with a picture rather than a text status, don’t hesitate to do so.
• Be brief: Are you in a mood to elaborate? Not a good idea: short posts (less than 250 characters) get two-thirds more people than long posts.
• The right days and the right hours: When should you write? If you have a Facebook page, you have surely noticed that time is crucial. The rule goes that the best time is when people aren’t working but are still not away from the internet. Ideal then would be the evening before sleep (around 10 pm), in the morning before work or during lunch. As far as days during the week go, statistics say that Thursday and Friday seem the best. But it’s often more complicated than that. The weather plays a significant role for example– if it’s the first beautiful day after weeks of weather misery, don’t expect people to stand in line to like your posts. Similarly, a rainy Sunday afternoon can turn out to be the best time.

The Arab region accounts for 6% of the world’s mobile connections. This may not sound like much, but dig a little deeper and you can see that the region has had a remarkable mobile decade – with connections growing at more than 32% a year for the past 10 years.

Research by Deloitte for the GSMA has revealed that by the end of 2012 there were 391 million mobile connections across the Arab states. Just ten years ago that figure stood at 19 million. The only region where mobile connections have grown at a faster rate during that period is sub-Saharan Africa.

Looking ahead, these trends are expected to continue, not least because two-thirds of the MENA population is under the age of 30. Young and increasingly tech savvy, the Arab Digital Generation may be leading the way, but take up of mobile technology is starting to cut across all demographics.

The good news for media organisations is that “news and feeds” apps are popular amongst the region’s mobile smartphone users, but it is essential for news organisations to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in developing a mobile strategy, as use varies widely not just across this diverse region but also within countries.

One region, many markets

Like other developing markets, although the MENA region has experienced dramatic mobile growth in the past decade, the picture is more complex than headline statistics suggest. Not only are there huge variations between urban and rural populations within countries, on a regional level large, wealthy countries’ usage distorts the region’s mobile figures.

Much of this complexity stems from the fact that, despite many shared linguistic and religious characteristics, the Arab world is far from homogenous. In particular, there are considerable socio-economic differences between the Gulf countries in the Middle East and the Arabic (and French) speaking nations of North Africa.

These differences – which include household incomes and employment levels – also manifest themselves very clearly in the adoption of new technology. The region is polarised between countries such as Saudi Arabia which enjoys a mobile penetration rate of 209% – and a smartphone penetration level of 54% – and South Sudan where mobile penetration is just 22%.

Recognising that the Middle East is not a single market but many different markets is an important starting point for news outlets. What works in one country, may not work in another for a number of reasons including connectivity, competition and context.

Another factor which can skew our understanding of the region is the dominance of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Collectively they account for 40% of all mobile connections in the Arab world, as well as some of the region’s largest online and offline populations. Egypt alone represents 20% of the MENA population, whilst Saudi Arabia  – with an internet population of 8.5m – has an internet universe 17 times larger than that of nearby Oman.

Given this, it is not surprising that these two countries heavily influence markets for content consumption and social media activity.

In the social sphere, as the Dubai School of Government’s 5th Arab Social Media Report  showed, usage of Twitter in the Middle East is dominated by Saudi Arabia. With 1.9 million active users in March 2013, it dwarfs its nearest rival (Egypt, with 519,000 active Twitter users).

Conversely, Egypt dominates MENA’s usage of Facebook.  Of the 54.5 million active Facebook users in the region, over a quarter are in Egypt. With just 16% of Egypt’s population on Facebook, there is plenty of room for growth too.

For news organisations looking to develop mobile strategies, they will want to make sure not to rely on regional statistics but the most up-to-date information about their own countries.

Deciphering mobile behaviours

Although there is an increasingly rich seam of data about mobile take-up in the Middle East, understanding what users do with this technology is harder to ascertain. Nonetheless, we can establish some characteristics about mobile behaviours in the region. The most striking of which is the volume of mobile usage.

Research by Northwestern University in Qatar concluded that MENA residents are online for 17 hours a week  through wireless devices.  How this time is spent is unknown, but anecdotally chat apps, social networking and gaming are all popular pastimes. Given that users spend 2-4 hours a day on social networks, it is likely that much of this activity is undertaken on mobile devices.

Q: How much time per week do you use the Internet through wireless handheld device(s)?
BASE: Internet and Wireless Hand-held Device Users
Base with selected filters: 5177

Much of this activity is on Facebook, which is used by 94% of social network users. This is followed by 51% on Twitter and 45% on Google+. These findings offer further clues for news providers about where they should focus their social presence and the extent of the potential social opportunity.

Alongside Northwestern’s study, new data from Ipsos MORI offers further insights into the online habits of users across 6 MENA countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon and Kuwait).

Of particular interest to news businesses is the finding that amongst smartphone users, “news and feeds” is the top category for app downloads across four of the six countries they surveyed (see slide 22).

This is good news for providers such as LBCI News, Alarabiya and BBC Arabic – all of whom have produced a range of mobile apps – although these figures do need to be treated with some caution, as downloaded apps do not necessarily translate into use and some of these smartphone markets are still quite small.  In Egypt, for example, just 5% of the total population own a smartphone, against overall mobile penetration of 105%, and in Jordan this figure is 19%, compared to 143% total mobile penetration.  Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether “news and feeds” remains the top download category in these countries as smartphone adoption grows.

A further encouraging statistic from Ipsos lies in the role played by the web as the primary platform for daily news consumption amongst internet users. This finding was reinforced by Northwestern’s study, which reported that 49% of internet users in the region used the web daily for local, national or international news.

As with social networking activity, it is not clear how much of this daily news consumption is undertaken using mobile devices. However, given the high levels of mobile web browsing in the region, it is likely that much is through wireless devices.

The GSMA notes:

Due to the limited coverage of fixed-line networks and the associated cost of computers, mobiles are quickly becoming the main platform for internet browsing. Eleven countries in the region rank above the world average in mobile web browsing.

In countries such as Sudan, mobile browsing accounts for 45% all internet activity, followed by Libya, Oman and Kuwait at around 25%. This is compared with a global average of 10%.

Of course, as we noted with desktop digital media, consumers are often ahead of advertisers. You will need to evaluate not only the consumer appetite but also the business opportunity as you determine how to stage your strategy.

Further Implications

Whilst we need to undertake further research into what content mobile users are consuming, these statistics should provide encouragement for news providers. On the horizon, content providers should also consider these three developments which may shape their editorial vision and portfolio:

4G and Video

4G is a reality in some Middle East countries and about 167 m videos are viewed every day on YouTube across the region. As with Twitter this is a network where Saudi Arabia leads the way. With 90 m video views every day, Saudi Arabia enjoys the highest number of YouTube views in the world per internet user. And although most YouTube consumption is typically through a desktop, this is not the case in Saudi Arabia where 50% of these views are on mobile devices.

Across the region mobile video consumption is only likely to increase, particularly as LTE networks expand. Cisco’s Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, argues that the Middle East and Africa will be the fastest growing region for mobile data, with a growth rate of 77% CAGR between 2012 and 2017. Globally, Cisco estimates that by 2017 video will account for two-thirds of the world’s mobile data.

Managing technological divides

Alongside the roll-out of 4G networks and an increased penetration of smartphones, content providers must continue to be mindful of digital divides. Outside of cities, for example, fixed line connectivity is often quite low. Mobile broadband may therefore be the only way for some rural audiences to enjoy online content.

For feature phone users, SMS based news and information may remain popular for some time, especially if smartphone adoption in the region fails to exceed 40-50% in the next five years as Ericsson’s 2013 mobility report  suggests.

What’s interesting about this prediction is that some MENA countries already exceed this level of adoption.  Nielsen  noted in 2012 that Qatar has a 75% penetration of smartphones, a figure higher than the total mobile penetration of some Arab countries.

As Northwestern University in Qatar recently noted across the region there is:

…a genuine digital divide, between the four wealthy Gulf states – Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE – and those that do not share such abundance – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. The digital divide demarcates technological abilities in the Arab world about as starkly as anywhere on earth.

Content providers therefore may wish to consider repurposing their output to reflect these technological realities. Basic technologies such as SMS and FM radio continue to sit alongside more sophisticated mobile technology such as 4G, and to reach the largest possible audience, news organisations will want to serve both high-tech and lower-tech audiences. Ideas submitted to the annual Knight News Challenge offer some suggested ways forward, as do some of the strategies employed by Al Jazeera. The network simulcast their English service on FM radio in Doha, and to reach US audiences which might not be able to watch Al Jazeera English on cable or satellite networks due to lack of carriage, the channel offers US audiences a telephone number they can call so that they can listen to it on their phone.

Media literacy

Finally news providers also have a role in promoting participation in news discourse and its consumption. With the technology increasingly in place across the region for audiences to consume content via a mobile device, publishers may need to encourage this adoption by educating audiences on how to do this. Western broadcasters such as the BBC have used promotional campaigns and presenter endorsements to promote Video on Demand and other online services for some time.  As with some of the other ideas in this article this is arguably something Middle Eastern media could do more of.

The good news for news providers is that high mobile penetration levels, coupled with a strong interest in news  – as well as the popularity of mobile browsing and social networking – mean that the building blocks to create a mobile audience are already in place. By harnessing the creative potential of these platforms and promoting their services to a wider range of users, then digital news in the Middle East can move forward to the next stage in its evolution.

However, look beyond these standouts, and the picture is much more mixed. Fortunately, with more paid content projects being launched in the last two years, we now have the data to understand the factors that determine success or failure.

While it is easy to point to the size and resources of the New York Times and the Financial Times, they alone do not guarantee success. While pursuing a very different paid content strategy than the FT and the New York Times, The Times of London has not been as successful with its paid content model, and it is backed by the resources of News Corp. Away from the big beasts of Western Europe and the US, Piano Media works with many smaller publishers and has shown that size doesn’t necessarily matter.

As Tomáš Bella, CEO of Piano Media, said in our previous coverage of paid content, user experience does matter.  It is a point that Earl Wilkinson, the executive director and CEO of the International News Media Association, echoed in talking about the differences between success and failure in paid content strategies. Wilkinson said:

What media company executives tell me privately, across the industry worldwide, is the radically different performance in digital subscriptions has nothing to do with content or design. It has everything to do with a very poor user sign-up experience online.

Your audience expects the easy user experience and excellent customer service of major e-commerce sites, and if you can’t provide that, your paid content strategy will suffer.

Research and data are key

To deliver the best paid content user experience, both Piano Media and the New York Times used research and analytics to refine their approach.

Paul Smurl, Vice President, The New York Times Company, speaking at the Digital Innovators’ Summit in Berlin earlier this year, advised companies to “listen to readers and take their guidance”. It takes “rounds and rounds of research, in person”, he said.

For most companies and especially small independent news organisations, this kind of intensive research costs too much. However, this should be one of the criteria you use when evaluating a paid content company to work with. How deep is their research, not only generally about their own paid content products, but also what kind of audience research can they provide to you.

Wilkinson pulled no punches in criticising the poor user experience many news publishers provide when they are asking their audiences to pay for content.

The consumer expects Amazon. Instead, they are getting a clunky registration process that is the product of poor engineering.

And he believes the reason for such poor engineering is clear.

There are too many print people touching digital (and not enough digital people touching print) in the news industry. Either change the people or outsource this process.

Getting the user to the sign-up page

Of course, you first have to get a potential customer to your sign-up page, and as we recently covered, email and social media marketing are key in getting the customer there, according to British magazine publisher IPC Media.

As most publishers know, building a digital audience is relatively easy, but engaging that audience enough to be able to generate revenue from them is another thing. IPC media head of subscription marketing Beatriz Montoya said at a Media Briefing conference in London that the publisher was considering allowing readers access to some premium content if they left their email. Many other sites have added pop-ups that encourage readers to sign up for newsletters.

Email registration is the first step in engaging customers more deeply with your content and encouraging them to subscribe. It gives you a communication and marketing channel to your online audience, but when developing your multi-platform sustainability strategy, it is important that your digital marketing works in concert with your traditional marketing strategy.

Knowing your audiences better

The heavy use of data does not end in designing your paid content offering. In fact, while paid content and advertising are often seen as competing strategies, they are complementary. Digital paid content strategies are about deeper engagement with your audience and deeper knowledge about your audience, and that can be a very attractive proposition for advertisers.

Business Day in South Africa launched the first paid content strategy in the country, BDLive, earlier this year. They use a metered model, where digital audiences get some content for free before being asked to pay. It is similar to the approach used by the FT and the New York Times, and they have worked with Evolok to provide the sign-on and management system.  South African website The Media Online looked at progress at BDLive, including how it is leveraging deeper user data to improve advertising performance.

For advertisers, the subscription model relies on sophisticated analytic tools and data gleaned from user profiles and user behaviour to enable advertisers to construct clear, precisely defined campaigns with minimal churn.  Since its launch, BDlive has attracted a number of campaigns from major South African companies and sold sponsorship packages in a range of niche areas to both large and small corporate brands and public sector firms.

Keeping your subscribers

Of course, gaining new digital and print subscribers is one thing, keeping them is another. In addition to the success of the metered model, many publishers are coupling this with a bundled model, in which they combine print and digital or desktop, mobile and tablet apps in a single subscription. To make this print-digital bundling possible, it is important for news groups to make sure they have CRM, customer-relationship management, systems that are up to the task.

The sign-up page may be turning away would-be subscribers, but Wilkinson believes that another reason for poorly performing paid content strategies is the poor integration of print and digital CRM systems.

Obsessed with delivering a perfect “print + digital” sign-up experience, publishers can’t get their back-end databases to talk with each other efficiently enough – and that back-end difficulty is getting translated to the front-end.

How many times have you gone to a website to buy something and stopped because the shopping or payment process was too difficult? That is what too many potential customers are finding when they try to pay you for your content. The industry has been focused on print and digital editorial integration, but Wilkinson is highlighting that commercial integration is just important.

As more publishers adopt paid content strategies, we now know that people will pay for digital content and we also are beginning to understand what determines success or failure. As you pursue your paid content strategy, remember:

• Digital audiences have high expectations when it comes to ease of use. Use data and research to make sure you aren’t turning potential customers away.
• Use the data you gain from your paid content strategy to deliver better results for your advertisers. This will allow you to grow your subscription and advertising revenue.
• Make sure your CRM systems across print and digital work together so you can deliver the best customer experience to your subscribers regardless of the platform.

Email marketing seems so low-tech, but it is enjoying a resurgence because it is inexpensive and, if done well, it works.

In an article on technology news site Wired, highlighting an “email newsletter renaissance”, former Hufftington Post Chief Technical Officer Paul Berry said:

As much as we’re told e-mail isn’t sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter, and the reason they do is we’re all on e-mail and it brings you back.

An email marketing success story

Two years ago, the Foundation for New Journalism in Iberoamerica launched a programme to provide technical and commercial skills to the rapidly growing number of news and information start-ups in Latin America. As part of this programme, 10 start-ups were chosen “based on their journalism and ethical standards, and their potential for growth” to take part in an entrepreneurial journalism programme.

The results were impressive leading, on average, to an 80 percent increase in site visits across the start-ups, according to James Breiner, writing for IJNet and News Entrepreneurs.  A Salvadoran sports site was a standout success:

El Salvador FC, a soccer website, increased its total visits by 264 percent to more than 1 million by employing a series of strategies, such as updating news at least 10 times a day, promoting news through email and seeding its news in other blogs and web pages.

Obviously, email was part of a broader strategy of regular updates and a wider social media campaign, for example, successful Facebook campaigns drive about 20 percent of the traffic to the site. But you don’t have to choose between email and social media – an effective digital marketing and engagement campaign can and should use both.

It is also important to point out that simply building audience doesn’t guarantee sustainability; despite its success with increasing traffic, El Salvador FC is not yet profitable. However, as the site works towards the break even point, its email and social media strategy has added audience with low costs, although it is time intensive. El Salvador FC founder and editor Carlos Lopez Vides said:

This type of marketing costs us nothing but does require a big time investment. It recognizes the power of the users to share and recommend the product. We, the editors, have to empower the users to maintain their interest and support.

As Lopez Vides says, email marketing is inexpensive. A study in the UK found that it a fraction of the cost of other marketing methods such as direct mail or telemarketing. It was even cheaper than SMS marketing. The same study found that it also had a higher response rate than direct mail or internet advertising, although lower than direct mail or SMS marketing.

How to create a successful email campaign

Just as with your digital strategy in general, data will be key to the success of your email newsletter marketing efforts, and with the renewed interest in email newsletters as an audience building or marketing tool, we have access to data on best practices even before you start.

Email marketings software company GetResponse analysed 21 m messages sent during the first quarter of 2012 to determine the best open and click through rates and also the highest engagement times. The analysis found (emphasis theirs):

One of the most important conclusions is that sending newsletters during readers’ top engagement times of 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. can increase their average open rates and CTR by 6%.

However, they also point out that you need to analyse your own data to make sure you understand how your subscribers behave.

Another factor that can affect open rates is the subject line of your email. Another newsletter service provider, MailChimp, analysed 40m subject lines to see which ones worked best. They even have a tool that will give you a rating of words used in your subject line based on historical response rates. They compared the best performing subject lines, email newsletters that were opened by 60 to 87 percent of recipients, versus the worst performing subject lines, those that were only open one to 14 percent, and they found:

On the “best” side, you’ll notice the subject lines are pretty straightforward. They’re not very “salesy” or “pushy” at all. Heck, some people might even say they’re “boring.” On the “worst” side however, notice how the subject lines read like headlines from advertisements you’d see in the Sunday paper. They might look more “creative,” but their open rates are horrible.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t be creative in your subject lines, but their research found that it was all about expectations. “The best subject lines tell what’s inside,” they said.

Fortunately, email newsletter software such as GetReponse and MailChimp has become increasingly sophisticated, allowing you to do A/B testing. This feature allows you to test the performance of subject lines or delivery times, for example, Mailchimp will send the same email using two subject lines to a small percentage of your list, then automatically sends out the email with the best performing subject line once the trial period has ended.

Marketing your paid content offering

Email registration for newsletters has also been used as part of a paid content revenue strategy, allowing those who register to access premium content on your site.

As digital advertising rates dropped, publishers have used email newsletter signups to gain more information about their users, which they use to deliver more targeted advertising and as part of the marketing strategy for their paid content offerings.

British magazine publisher IPC offered email newsletter subscribers access to ‘certain content’ to entice readers to sign up for newsletters or register with sites, says The Media Briefing. Once IPC has an email address, it works to gain even more data about these users so that they can tailor marketing messages about subscriptions and paid content options.  It is a typical funnel marketing strategy.

Email marketing may seem simple, but successful news organisations and media companies are using it in incredibly sophisticated ways as a means to increase their audience and audience engagement and also as the first step in marketing their paid content offerings. The key is to make sure that you’re taking advantage of all of the tools that modern email marketing software delivers so you can get the best results.

US tech and media consultant Alan Mutter highlights the rise of Google and the collapse of US newspaper advertising

In the early phase of any media transition, we rely on what we know and try to adapt the thinking of the current medium to the new media. In the early days of television news, broadcasts were often little more than a radio newsreader sitting in front of a camera. It took time for us to understand how TV was different and how best to use this new visual medium.

The changes in thinking needed to effectively adapt to a new medium are not just editorial but also commercial. Alan Mutter, who has worked in newspapers and in digital media start-ups, has succinctly summarised the changes that digital media has brought to advertising as a matter of the traditional media model of ‘reach’ versus the targeted digital model of ‘each’.

Pre-digital advertising relied on reaching as many people as possible, while not being as concerned with targeting specific audiences or consumers. To the extent that it was possible to reach specific consumers, it was done with special sections in newspapers or magazine content. Digital advertising allows much greater targeting, and Google’s commercial breakthrough was to deliver ads based on what people are searching for. The logic goes that if someone is looking for a holiday flight then they might also be looking for a hotel or rental car. Print media were woefully late in grasping this key difference in advertising strategies. While Mutter is discussing the US market, the changes in digital advertising are universal and relevant to any market. In fact, in some markets in the early stages of the digital transition, his insights are in some ways even more relevant and could help news businesses to avoid the strategic blunders made by the US newspaper industry.

As we’ve discussed a number of times here on Knowledge Bridge, one of the biggest challenges in the digital transition is that news organisations face a new class of competitors for digital ad revenue, and one of the biggest mistakes that newspapers, in particular, made is that they continued to view their competition as other newspapers or other news media, instead of appreciating the competitive threat posed by new digital competitors such as search engines and social networks. Looking at more than a decade of data, Mutter lays out the dire consequences of this miscalculation:

 In less than a dozen years, this upstart start-up built a $46 billion advertising business that was twice as large last year as the combined print and digital ad sales of all of the 1,382 daily newspapers in the land.

He produced a graph, looking at newspaper print and digital ad revenue versus Google’s ad revenue. In dramatic terms, the graph shows how US print advertising has utterly collapsed since its peak in 2005, while Google’s advertising revenue was 15 times greater than all US newspapers digital ad revenue in 2012, Mutter says, based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America.

Mutter accuses the newspaper industry of a lack of imagination and says that it simply tried to apply the traditional advertising model to digital, while completely failing to understand that a different advertising model based on harnessing user data to deliver highly relevant, targeted and efficient ads was dominant in digital. Mutter says:

Newspapers (along with magazines, billboards and broadcasters) represent the traditional but inefficient “reach” model of advertising, which depends on spreading a commercial message to as large an audience as possible in hopes of connecting with qualified customers who happen at the moment to be receptive to it.  Google, on the other hand, represents the highly efficient “each” model of advertising, which lets marketers put customized commercial messages next to only the results of searches containing specific keywords they have selected to target their ads. The Google system not only enables marketers to target exactly the right prospect at the right moment but also makes it remarkably easy to monitor response rates and, thus, measure an ad’s return on investment in real time.

The key question for publishers and media executives is how to respond to this competitive threat. Mutter gives some advice.

• Know your audience. Invest in technology that allows you not just to know how many unique visitors you have on your site but also as much as possible about what they are reading, who they are and what are their interests.
• Invest in ad targeting technology. Companies such as Crowd Science provide ad targeting services that will help you deliver much more relevant, and therefore, better performing advertising.
• Use specialist or niche content to sell ads relevant to that content. It isn’t a digital innovation that if you have a food section that you sell ads for restaurants, grocers or other food-related businesses. If you have a fashion section, again, you’ll want to make sure that your clothing and other fashion-related clients know about the opportunity to reach interested members of your audience.

Understanding this key shift from ‘reach’ to ‘each’ advertising will help you develop strategies that more effectively compete against new digital competitors as you seek to grow your digital advertising revenue. The game has changed, and you need to grasp these changes if you want to win.

Facebook may be the king of social networks, but it never rests on its laurels or market-leading position. Many social networks have come and gone, and Facebook is constantly tweaking its winning formula and design. It has just announced major changes to its signature news feed, changes that have profound implications for news organisations.

Unlike the changes in 2011, when Facebook launched frictionless sharing, the new changes could help Facebook users find your content, but you’ll need to make a few changes to how you share your content and how your page looks to make your editorial stand out. The key is to use bigger and better images. TV and radio stations and networks will want to consider posting more content as well, as it will be easier for users to filter their news feeds based on photos, music and video.

It will take months for the new design to roll out, but if you want to get an early look, you can sign up for the waiting list to switch here. If Facebook is a key element of your social media strategy, it’s definitely worth it.

Facebook wants to be a ‘personalised newspaper’

It is not a secret that Facebook wants to be the main lens through which its users view the world and the world’s media. In announcing the new changes to the news feed, founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he wants Facebook to become a ‘personalised newspaper’. Many of the changes are designed to allow users to quickly filter their news feed, not just by their relationship to people they have friended and followed but also based on the type of content, whether the content includes photos, music or video.

On how Facebook plans to deliver this personalised experience, Craig Kanalley, senior editor for “Big News & Live Events” at The Huffington Post, is very excited with the changes and described many of the new features and how they will allow for greater personalisation:

I have topical feeds, interest lists, of “News,” “Hockey,” “Journalists, “Tech,” and more. I have geo-located feeds too that Facebook auto-created for me like friends in Buffalo (my hometown), friends in New York City (where I live). I can browse all of these sections and discover content posted just moments ago, quickly and easily from the sectional navigation of my “personalized newspaper” at the top right. Tiny gray notification bubbles let me know how many new posts have gone up in a section since I last visited it.

Of course, this will require users to invest a bit more in customising Facebook. However, even if people don’t choose to take full advantage of these settings and topical lists, there are other changes that will have an impact on how the content of news organisations will appear and how prominently it will appear for Facebook users.

What this means for news organisations

The changes actually give news organisations more opportunity to catch the attention of your audience, but you might need to make some changes to your current Facebook strategy.

Multimedia matters – The first big change that you will notice is that pictures and images associated with videos will be bigger. When a user shares one of your stories, a much larger image will appear in the news feeds. The content is now front and centre in the news feed. If you want your stories to stand out, you’ll need to share stories with strong, eye-catching pictures. Social media and tech site Mashable says:

Photos now make up nearly half of all News Feed stories, according to Facebook, up from 30% just a year ago. That growth is likely to accelerate now that Facebook is enlarging the size of photos in the News Feed. Facebook recommends publishers use images with a width of at least 552 pixels.

Facebook is doing this because it is bringing to the desktop a lot of features that it already has on its mobile app, and in mobile, images are increasingly a strong hook for readers as they quickly scan their news feeds with a swipe of their finger.

Make the cover image of your page stand out – Keeping with the theme of being more visual, when a fan likes your page, a larger, more visual sharing element will appear in their news feeds so you might want to upgrade the cover image for your page.

Focus on encouraging fans to share your content – This has always been important, but with the new changes, it will become even more important. One of the new ways for Facebook users to filter their feeds is “All Friends”. Kanalley from The Huffington Post describes it this way:

The “All Friends” feed is one of the most addicting parts of the new Facebook homepage. It’s real-time, and it’s easily accessible at all times, just one click away in the top right of the screen. It delivers your friends, and only your friends, no sponsored posts, no brands, nothing else.

This means that if you are running a sponsored post campaign, your content might not be reaching as wide an audience as in the past if some users decide to use the “All Friends” view as their default view. However, they will see when their friends share your content. This is why it will be important to think about ways to focus your Facebook efforts on the most shareable content with attractive images and compelling multimedia.

Related content from pages and people (such as celebrities) you’ve liked – Some coverage referred to this as curated posts, but it really is a new class of “story type”, according to Lavrusik. For instance, if you liked a site such as The Huffington Post, you might see a post in your news feed with the most shared stories from the site. If you are a fan of a celebrity, you might see a post with the latest trending news about that celebrity.

Changes merge mobile and desktop design – The changes to the news feed incorporate some of the features already found on the mobile and tablet apps. If your audience uses Facebook primarily on mobile, adapting your strategy will have added importance.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has looked to become the default filter for news media. In 2011, Zuckerberg announced frictionless sharing and several major media companies, including the Guardian and The Washington Post, launched apps that effectively replicated their sites within the social network. For a while, Facebook drove large amounts of traffic to their content, but the feature created a lot of noise, a lot of concern and even some embarrassment for users. Within months of launch, Facebook made changes to the way that the newspapers’ content appeared in the news feed. Traffic crashed to the apps, and both the the Guardian and the Post have since withdrawn the apps.

However, this update gives news organisations more opportunity to highlight their content rather than get lost in the noise of automatic sharing. It does require you to focus more on the visual elements of your stories, but with the focus on pictures, this might lead more users to click through to your stories. This could be a very good development, and for TV companies with video ad units embedded in the video, this might also increase CPMs and revenue. This update has the opportunity to benefit news organisations and not just benefit Facebook.

Other resources

For other summaries of the changes:

• The San Jose Mercury News has an excellent summary of the six major features in the news feed changes.
• Vadim Lavrusik, the Journalism Program Manager at Facebook, explained the changes in the news feed.
• The Drum got feedback on the new Facebook changes from marketing, social media and advertising leaders.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan looked at “507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 months” and took into consideration “(behavioural), content, and network data” to answer the question of what drives growth in Twitter followers.

The study, which is available in PDF form, found:

• “Message content significantly impacts follower growth.” If you’re negative, your follower numbers will go down, but “expressing positive sentiment” helps grow your number of followers.
• One finding supports the common advice that you should fill out your profile completely.
• Good writing helps, and the study found that readability will help increase your following as well. “When deciding whether or not to follow a virtual stranger, we found Twitter users seek out well-written over poorly written content,” CJ Hutto from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the study told New Scientist.
• In good news for news organisations, “informational content attracts new followers”.

That’s what you should do to increase followers, but the study also found some practices to avoid unless you want to send your follower numbers plummeting.

• Be careful that the tweets don’t stray into simple promotion of your news organisation. The study drew a contrast between “Informers, those who share informational content” and “Meformers, those who share content about themselves”. The report found “Meformers were reported to have almost three times fewer followers than Informers.”
• Don’t clutter your tweets with multiple hashtags. Hashtags can be useful to combine tweets about a single event or ongoing story, such as an election campaign. However, one hashtag will do instead of three.
• The study also found that “broadcast communications” rather than directed communications have a negative impact on your follower count too. It’s important to put this finding in context for news organisations, which often use their primary accounts to share their content very much in a broadcast manner. These accounts often have a lot of followers. One key finding from BBC research is that editorial choice, even for their main BBC-branded accounts, is important. Simply using your Twitter or other social networking accounts to broadcast all of your stories isn’t the most effective use of social media.

However, for individual journalists, it is clear from internal research at MSN network and the BBC that for journalists’ accounts, they have much higher levels of engagement and interaction and also have a stronger and larger network. This interaction – comments, questions and responses – is what the study means by directed communication. Individual journalists need to remember to act as individuals rather than headline services for their own content.

Of course, Twitter use does vary across cultures. What strategies have you tried that have helped you gain the following you have? Were there any techniques that you used that you believe cost you followers? What differences have you found in how Twitter or other social networks are used in your culture? Share your tips in the comments.

In the discussion of the digital transition, there are hopes for new opportunities but also fears. Apart from the worry about business disruption, there is also a fear of creating a digital divide between one world of wealthy, well-informed tablet-toting news consumers and another, not only poorer in terms of wealth, but also in terms of information.

At the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change Startup Showcase, Arthur Attwell, founder and CEO of print-on-demand book start-up Paperight, put the challenge this way in the context of South Africa:

I come from Cape Town, South Africa, and my background’s in educational publishing and e-book production. South Africa is like two different countries: about 2 million wealthy people who support the publishing industry (excluding schools publishing, where the state is the largest client by far), and about 48 million people who could never afford an e-reader, don’t have credit cards to buy things online, or can’t afford to physically travel to a bookstore. So to make it possible for most people to read books, we need to totally rethink how we sell books.

While Attwell was very aware of the challenge, he also saw an opportunity. Although technology can create divides, it can also bridge them. He had seen books distributed via Mxit, a mobile social network with 10 m users in South Africa, but he felt that he needed a lower tech solution because 65 percent of South Africans do not have access to the internet, according to recent census data. In the South Africa media and technology site Ventureburn, Attwell said:

African countries have very few bookstores and ebooks are spreading very slowly. Photocopy shops, however, are everywhere, and in most places in Africa, they provide an important social function by photocopying books that people need, but can’t find or can’t afford to buy. Paperight was started to help legalise that process.

Copy shops may not be the sexy end of technology. They are very much 20th Century technology rather than the shiny, cutting edge technology of smartphones, smart TVs and tablets. Instead of trying to convert potential readers to new habits, Attwell decided to tap into existing habits.

The idea also has a hook for publishers. Before Paperight, publishers would see the copy shop activity as piracy and lost sales. Paperight delivered a way for them to convert illegal activity into legal sales. With this compelling case, Paperight has already signed up 40 publishers and offers 1400 titles, including text books, study materials, literary classics, magazines and even sheet music. The start-up first approached copy shop chains to grow their distribution network as quickly as possible. The barrier to become a Paperight outlet is low. Copy shops only need to go to Paperight.com and register their shop. Paperight is now available in 145 outlets in South Africa.

To purchase materials from Paperight, all a customer needs to do is to go to a participating copy shop where they can search Paperight’s catalogue of materials to see if they have the book or other material he or she wants. In addition to the cost of the licence for the material, the copy shop also includes their own costs to download and print it out in the price. The buyer pays the copy shop, and then the shop pays the publisher.

Ubiquitous copy shops are not just a South African phenomenon, and Attwell told Publishers Weekly, “We designed Paperight to be an international business.”

Print and digital delivery for long-form journalism

Paperight was just named a winner at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Startup Showcase, and while the company’s primary focus is to make books legally available via nearly ubiquitous copy shops across South Africa, long-form journalism groups are already seeing opportunities with print-on-demand services like Paperight. For news publishers, the easiest way to think about this is that it is much like news groups selling long-form journalism on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader packaged as Kindle Singles.

South African non-fiction publisher Mampoer Shorts publishes non-fiction pieces for e-readers, tablets and print out. It describes the content as “shorter than a book (but) richer than an article”. It describes its mission as:

We proudly bring long-form journalism to South Africa. Our unique and novel reading experience will change the way your read for ever. Read the best journalism on any device, and see how South African writers and journalists can blow your socks off!

The shorts are available on a number of tablets and e-reading platforms as well as print-out. It shows how multi-platform digital and print delivery can deliver your content to your audiences regardless of how they want to consume it. The key issue here is making the process cost effective for you, but Paperight shows that services are developing to meet this need and allow you to tap into existing consumer behaviour.