When you switch to digital, the goal is to grow the social media platforms in record time across different platforms, to grow readership and also to make people realise exactly what your brand is and break the misconceptions about your brand.
Hopefully by the end of this article, you will learn what the strategies are, what to do and what not to do.
There are milestones to celebrate and the goal of choosing the right content and how content affects traffic and user engagement on your website has had a huge role in the growth of the platforms across all media.
You can record double digit growth in as little as three months across all the social media platforms your brand is on if you understand the need for consistency. There is the unique challenge of managing people with cross cultural differences and balancing innovation and change, with a commitment to quality and the challenges of collaborating with the different products within the organization.
On raising awareness
The Social Media team has the unique role of helping marketing convert readers into subscribers because of its responsibility to improve brand awareness by using different strategies. We introduce people to the brand but our goal isn’t to directly drive subscriptions. Our goal is to raise awareness and expand the top end of the funnel and once we have done that, it’s the job of marketing to convert them into subscribers.
On the expansions:
Most of what you do in the first 12 months is figuring out what works and doesn’t work across the different platforms. So there is a lot of experimentation with many new platforms and exploring is the best way to get news out and build on the trends in 2017.
The first four months was pretty different, it was about catching up, pumping up volume, getting content out on every available platform, reminding people that we’re around I would characterise it as experimenting.
On allocating data:
The next six months will be about reading and analysing data to help us better understand where we are over- or underperforming relative to the time spent across each of the platforms. We use data to help us make better decisions, smarter decisions about how to allocate our time on social media. We audit our social media channels and record the results. We also experimented with Pinterest for two month but via the measured results, we didn’t see a worthwhile impact so we automated Tumblr.
On attracting new readers:
It is impossible to predict accurately the number of challenges that may arise but we had two challenges: the first was a lack of awareness of the brand as there is a brand with the same name in a European country and in South Africa so we had to push out the logo of the brand all the time to differentiate between the brands with the same name.
The second challenge was a misconception that we were only about business news. The BusinessDay brand has conferences, Books & Wines, Events, TV, and the newspaper as products.
Social Media helped solve some of these problems by educating and informing our followers about BusinessDay. Everything we do on Social Media is about increasing awareness of the brand, getting people to understand who we are and breaking misconceptions about BusinessDay.
On increasing brand awareness:
We have social media contributors in different places around the world who feed us with content from other countries on Family, Travel, and Life & Arts. We have Therealgist.com that deals with entertainment and empowerment of the woman or girl child. Then we have the CEO magazine targeted at millennial CEOs who are doing big things in the economy.
We have been experimenting with medium and the reason is that it gives us access to a highly educated, very engaged audience in urban areas across the Nigeria, Africa and frontier nations with a higher income threshold. We want to see if they’ll participate on that platform.
Advice to publishers using social media:
One of the first things we do is locate a problem that we want to solve. I ask three questions, why am I doing it? What do I hope to achieve? Is the result worth it for me to do it again?
E.g when we did the LinkedIn ads, we didn’t get the kind of results we expected so we changed our strategy for Linked and started getting responses.
Then we work with cross functional teams of designers, financial analysts, editors, developers, to innovate. We focused on getting the best content out and if we got a hit we continued focusing on building those particular kinds of content. Somehow we broke the walls and got everyone working together to achieve the goals that we set.
On communication with team members in different countries:
I overcome that challenge by having WhatsApp on all the time on my mobile phone. That way I can communicate with people in different states and different countries at the touch of a button. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning, after prayer, is check my mobile phone and respond to messages then I begin preparing for the day.
Most of us are in (Nigeria Lagos, PH, and Abuja) but we have someone in Kenya, another in London, and Ghana. We are pushing the limits and hopefully the coverage will double again in the next six months.
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