Operation Audience Engagement

To help with your next mission (and story!) we’ve created a checklist to help with Operation Audience Engagement.

The Challenge

Today’s readers have boundless digital options available. If you want to stand out from the rest, it’s more important than ever for digital publishers to build loyalty and deepen trust with their audiences. One of the main ways you can remain relevant, grow your audience, and stay afloat is through engagement.

What’s in it for you? When you engage, there is the opportunity to learn from your audience, increase brand loyalty, and civility online.

In a world where news organizations can come crashing down at any moment, arming yourself with this knowledge can not only differentiate yourself from the rest but can secure your future from an unwelcome fate.

All set? Let’s get started.

1. Build Your Business Case for Engagement

Engage your audience. Sound simple enough? But how? You need to adopt two-way communication with your audiences. Because audiences don’t want to be talked at, they want to be part of the conversation. And when readers are engaged, they are more likely to return, register, and subscribe.

One of the main ways they engage is in the comments they leave on your site. In fact, 68% spend more than 15% of their time there. Commenters are loyal readers who stay on-site longer, return more often, and access more pages. By taking an active role to engagement and interacting with your users, you can prompt their gradual increase up the “ladder of engagement” and convert passive readers to loyal users and subscribers.

This is your main mission and there are several steps you can take to achieve this.

2. Join the Discussion

Engage in the comments. Commenters generally aren’t expecting journalists or editors to respond, acknowledge, or validate their comments. So when they do, it shows that they are passionate about the topic and care about their readers’ opinions. And when journalists and editors engage in their readers’ comments, not only does this bring the highest conversion of passive readers to subscribers, but civility also increases.

Ultimately, this helps you build loyalty and credibility as a trusted source with your audience. Engagement is in your best interest in order to grow your audience and create a civil community.

3. Win the Battle Against Trolls

Here’s your secret weapon: Viafoura’s Smart automated algorithmic Moderation (SaaM). SaaM provides a safe place for engaging and civil discourse so you don’t have to focus on the dreaded “garbage removal.” It also allows editors or journalists to easily moderate and ban users directly from the comment thread.

Since human moderation can often be time-consuming, open to biases, and can’t possibly run 24/7, Smart Moderation is more effective in keeping the trolls far, far away, at all times of the day. It’s the trolls’ worst nightmare.

4. Recruit & Reward Members on Team Civility

Model civility. Identify the top comments from your stories that are valuable to the discussion, highlight them, and reply to the contributors. Modelling the behaviour you want others to follow will encourage commenters to try out for Team Civility, build off each other to express their views, and will show your dedication to the conversation.

Reward Team Civility members. With Viafoura’s “Trusted” and “Mod” user badges, editors and journalists can actively participate in the community or promote users who consistently contribute positive, valuable comments. Additionally, when editors are reading their own comment threads, they can promote a comment as an “Editor’s Pick” from the live story on the website rather logging in to Viafoura Administrator Account and finding the comment.

5. Size Up Your Audience

Learn more about your audience. Measuring audience engagement can help you understand more about your audience, how they’re engaging with your content, and shape what topics you choose to focus on in the future.

Viafoura’s Audience Insights shows you which stories are generating the most comments per minute velocity — a leading indicator of stories that will generate the most traffic overall. Other analytics tools can’t compete because they can only represent the total number of people viewing content and don’t provide a rich understanding of how they’re engaging with content and the community.

Checklist Complete?

How did you do? Share with us how you did in the comments. And tweet the takeaways for extra bonus points

Once you’ve successfully completed the checklist, Operation Audience Engagement is complete.

You’re ready to move on to the next level! Here’s the challenging part — your next mission is to maintain and build on the progress you’ve made. Time to earn those Engagement Superhero stripes!

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