Let me shed some insight on how we (and every other publisher that wants to survive) exploits social media.
Facebook – Has it’s own algorithm that decides what you see. If you like our page or engage with our posts then FB deems you a receptive audience and will present you with more posts from us. We have over half a million page likes on FB and our monthly timeline reach is currently over 4 million. You don’t have to like our page to see our posts. If you are interested in the topics we cover then FB itself will put our posts in your feed as it deems you may well like it (Suggested posts). A typical post will reach 30k timelines. What this means is that it’s extremely unlikely that you will see all our FB posts. The ultimate control over what you see on FB is down to FB and how you set up your profile and use it. If you see too much of one type of post then the fact you likely won’t engage (like, share comment) will indicate to the FB system that you aren’t interested in it and over time you will see less from that source.
Twitter: This is like a river. There’s tweets constantly being posted but each user only steps in to look at the posts occasionally through the day (some much more than others). With each visit the typical user will only view a limited number of the available posts (Typically – ie you may be an outlier that examines every single post between twitter visits). This means that the chances of you seeing a particular tweet at a particular time are limited. So, publishers like us will post the same link to a story several times a day.
Back to that river/stream analogue. It’s a bit like someone throwing footballs in the river up stream. You, further down stream, will pop over to the river bank several times a day but you won’t see every football float by.
We have 48k twitter followers. the average tweet is viewed 4000 times. That means statistically we should repost that same tweet 12 times a day to maximise the chances of every follower seeing it.
We don’t do that of course, but 2/3 times a day for a story link is typical. The chances of you seeing that same link twice are small, but with big audiences and a great range of usage profiles among users some of you will. But you are a small fraction of the overall audience.
We use these two SM channels to promote our content (including occasional forum posts) as that’s how we make money. There’s advertising around the content.
We also make money from posting stories to FB as Instant Articles, which also have ads in them. An Instant Article is one where the entire article is displayed on Facebook itself. Facebook is the distribution platform. You get to read that article within the FB app without having to leave the app and come over to our website to read the article. Instant Articles are only available on mobile to users of the FB app, but that’s 80% of all FB users currently and as I said earlier we are currently reaching 4 million timelines every month on FB.
Interesting stat: 80% of FB users who click on an external link give up before the destination website has rendered in their mobile browser. That’s an 80% dropout rate for every external link click for every publisher. So by clicking in the first place the user has indicated they want to read the content but the average delay of 8 seconds between click and the content loading is enough of a delay to make 80% of those users give up and click back to continue browsing their timeline for something else to read. and that incredible stat is why FB came up with Instant Articles, which load, well, instantly. Instead of a 20% hit rate they provide publishers with a 100% hit rate.
This website currently reaches about 1.5 million people every month. You can see from that the power that Facebook has over Publishers as a distribution platform. Websites are fast becoming central distribution hubs for publishers content and not the principal place where the publishers content is read or watched. One Facebook live broadcast can reach more individuals than a week of content on our website. Our Facebook live broadcasts from Mountain Mayhem reached a totals of 1.2 million Facebook timelines and were watched by over 150,000 people.
In short – publishers not using social media channels to promote and distribute their content will rapidly see their traffic and reach dry up.
If anyone is interested, then watch the story reads of one of our front page stories after it’s published. You should be able to spot the time when that story is promoted on FB – that will be when the reads suddenly leap from a few hundred to thousands in the space of a few hours.
Our new Social/Content Marketing manager is due to start in a week or so. That job is entirely about adapting, managing, growing all our SM channels in order to distribute our content to as wide an audience as possible.
