Tips from Our Stations: Elevating Your Digital Engagement Strategies
Credit: Chelsea Naughton / America Amplified
One of our mantras at America Amplified is that we all know a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. We say this all the time to each other AND to the stations we’re working with. So, with that in mind, we held five roundtable discussions (aka “Table Talks”) during our fly-in meetup for the 2024 Elections project. As expected, the attendees had a no shortage of great ideas and wisdom to share with one another on each of the topics.
Read the takeaways from our other sessions:
Building and Sustaining Community Partnerships | Listening Sessions 2.0
Forging Bonds in Overlooked Communities | Hearken Best Practices.
Elevating Your Digital Engagement Strategies
How we can use our social media and other digital platforms as tools for building trust and relationships with people outside our core audiences? What could you do that pushes the needle, beyond call-outs and Ask-Me-Anything posts?
TL;DR: Social media isn’t a traffic driver — it is another platform upon which you are delivering your news content. And one that allows for far more audience and community engagement than your website! So, don’t tease people with partial content.
Tips on using Instagram to promote election content:
Don’t try to make people leave the platform — fully inform them with your content on Instagram. Instagram IS the news destination, not a portal to your website.
People are looking for their news within the app and they often aren’t going to click through to read your story. As a public service, it’s our obligation to serve our audience in this way.
Don’t reference the other thing, don’t send them somewhere else. It’s right here!
Stories are a better place to put links than on your feed.
Do a daily news roundup, do a cover for that and post it every day or once a week, put it in your highlights
Instagram has been used as the primary social media platform to target younger audience members.
Deploy best practices when using Instagram, such as understanding/identifying key goals, content, and key messages and collaborating with other reliable pages and accounts.
Question: How do you adjust your content since it’s a different audience on Instagram than on your website or broadcast?
Do some testing — find low-lift efforts to compare what gets more engagement
If you create a post for instagram, it needs to be for the 20-45 audience
Pick local things that are unique to your coverage area that have strong visuals
Ultimate goal is to get a follow — grow our instagram audience, that’s who is the next generation of public media consumers
Then look for shares and saves
Question: How do you translate that into going to our website and consuming our content beyond instagram, then members?
You aren’t trying to send them to your website, you’re reaching people where they already are (in this case, on Instagram)
Instagram is another medium that your station lives on, just like your broadcast signal or your website. So, to drive membership there, you make the ask on that medium during fund drive just like you do on air.
Tips for other social media platforms (Facebook, TikTok, X):
Best use: It’s possible to build a community through social media by using Discord, Reddit and Facebook groups. By using one of these platforms, you’re able to build a community and assign moderators to “run” the group while you’re away.
A concern was brought up discussing, “How would it benefit us if it’s not a new audience.” Although this is a valid concern, the group would slowly gain members by other member invitations but these groups are mainly used to learn more about your market/audience directly. They will help you understand what they want, which will ultimately help you create content to better assist them.
Another concern: what if you don’t have the “manpower” to target all social media platforms? Should you put all your eggs in one basket or continuously post on all social media platforms with not as much support?
You can either do a “campaign set up,” where one would assess analytics on each platform to see what results produce well and/or conduct surveys at in-person events and community events and ask, “Where do you get your news?” Or “Where would you like to get your news?”. Then you make an informed decision about where your resources are best spent.
For most newsrooms, when it comes to promoting their news content, they post story links across platforms but have shifted their efforts to Instagram — other platforms aren’t getting as much engagement anymore. People shared that things will go viral once in a while on Facebook.
Tiktok: If you’re making Reels on Instagram and allowed to use TikTok, crosspost your Reels there!
Youtube: Putting podcasts on is successful (one of the most popular places for people to consume podcasts).
Tips for promoting Hearken on Social Media:
Note: You have to opt in now in order to see content the Instagram algorithm has flagged as “political” — let your audience know about this change and show them how to opt in.
Create posts that prompt users to submit questions either posts or stories. You can even use the submission button in Instagram stories. From there, one can manually fill in the Hearken survey.
Make carousels of the Question and Answers/FAQs
Do a quiz on the voting rules OR
Do a weekly news quiz on your stories
How’d you do – need a refresher? Go to this post or this story!
A small reward for an audience member can be just reading their name on air!
Tips for when you don’t have a digital person on staff:
It’s a tale as old as time: your social accounts aren’t just newsroom content — some of it is marketing messaging, a photo contest, etc. You have multiple people posting, so it’s hard to unify voice/cohesion. What do you do?
Have a style guide.
Set up a schedule in your social media management tool.
Have a meeting with each reporter at the beginning of their feature-writing process to come together and talk about what you could do that’s unique and incorporates engagement for their story.
Incorporate digital planning into your daily editorial meeting
Make a template for your story types that includes on-air requirements, web requirements, and social media requirements. Reporters will make a copy of that template each time they write a new story.
Learned how to make reasonable asks of the reporters, and be very specific with your asks — for example, “I need three candid, landscape (horizontal) photos with people occupying at least half of the frame.”
Make a “no go” list for images (i.e.: no pictures that are just of a building unless the story is ABOUT the building)
Tips for engaging through newsletters:
Resources:
Most basic, copy and paste newsletters can still be traffic drivers to your website (think a daily news digest with links)
On the other hand, give the newsletter an author and a voice so that the newsletter IS the content in and of itself! Inform people where they are, rather than using it to drive traffic to your website.
Think about collaboration with other community newsletters!! Newsletters are a great place for this.
Shining Example:
WFYI is getting a lot of success from video and visuals on Instagram
Doing Debriefs which is a carousel-style post, and the audiograms they post as Reels are getting good engagement
They’ve made a paradigm shift in the last 6 months:
The old way: take the audio and webify it THEN Insta-fy it
The new way: Instagram content isn’t a short version of the story … it IS the story.
