The good news: there are many other options to drive (and track!) traffic from social media. We’ll explore all of those in this Social News Desk blog series.

Traffic Driver #2: Twitter

Don’t forget about Twitter – it is an extremely effective way to get traffic to your website. And Social News Desk’s publishing-automation technology – Autopilot – leverages AI to make it easy to post all your best content, automatically, on a schedule you choose. That means less work, and more clicks!

Whether you want to publish your latest stories, republish your best content, or even re-share content across other accounts, there are many different ways to automate your Twitter content and optimize it as a source of traffic to your website.

Get Your Newest Content Out When It Matters

Twitter is a great outlet to showcase your latest stories. Why spend time crafting tweet after tweet when you can set up automation in minutes? As long as you have an RSS feed, you’re good to go! 

Many newsrooms set up several feeds for different topics: top stories, sports, entertainment, and so on. You can use one at a time, or several. This makes it easy to diversify the types of content followers see. From here, it’s a matter of choosing how you’d like the content to go out and when. And if you need to adjust content on the fly with breaking news — you can do that, too. We understand the need to be flexible and Autopilot accounts for that.

Republish Your Best Content – Over and Over

The quickest way to get more traffic from Twitter is simply to post more often. Unlike Facebook, there’s no penalty for re-posting the same link more than once or for posting “too often.” SND’s Autopilot makes is super easy to get your very best content out there – again and again. For example, you can choose to republish tweets that surpassed 2x, 4x, or 10x the average engagement. There’s no calculating, no configuring. Autopilot knows which tweets did well and will likely do well again. Let it do the work for you and have your best-performing content get even more clicks.

Re-share Content Across Other Accounts

Twitter is a large network, and it’s a great opportunity for newsrooms to share updates from other brand accounts. But that can get tedious! Social News Desk can do the heavy lifting by automatically re-sharing updates from any account you choose.

Whether it’s re-sharing a reporter’s tweets from an event or showcasing your weather account’s latest updates, it’s all possible with Autopilot. Just select which account you’d like to share from And, hey: it never hurts to cross-promote your newsroom talent!

Check Your Performance

SND offers several ways to track your performance on Twitter  – and it’s now more robust than ever. With many newsrooms soon to lose access to Facebook data within CrowdTangle, more data is now available right inside SND. In addition to Twitter metrics like favorites and retweets, you can now see video views, impressions and link clicks (among other stats).

If you want a quick look into what tweets are doing well — and even those that aren’t — Post Manager is a good place to start. You can sort by link clicks to see what people are clicking on, or even replies to see what tweets are generating conversations. Want to know just how far your Tweets have gone? We’ve got you covered there, too: sort by impressions to look at your brand presence.

If you want to track your Tweet metrics on an ongoing basis, you can build several different SND Reports. View them within its own Twitter Scorecard report (below), or alongside other social platforms within a Stats Roll-up Report or Enterprise Growth Report. Within each, you can view link clicks, video views, and impressions for your own accounts:

Tracking your Tweets within SND just got a whole lot easier! There’s now even more reason to dive into Twitter with these additional stats right inside SND. Need help? Ask us anytime.

The post Traffic Drivers: Get More Clicks from Twitter with SND’s Autopilot first appeared on Social News Desk.

But there are brighter days ahead… publishers have many, MANY other avenues to bring in traffic from social media to their websites. We’ll explore them in a Social News Desk blog series this Fall, so stay tuned.

Traffic Driver #1: Facebook Messenger

Social News Desk’s Messenger Experience can help deliver news directly to your followers’ Facebook Messenger inbox, bypassing the Facebook Feed entirely. The best part? Once you set it up, you don’t have to do anything else to start delivering daily digests (unless you want to)!

The beauty of SND’s Messenger bot is that you can literally set it and forget it!

Mykal Vincent, Digital News Supervisor, WVUE-TV

We’re seeing great clickthrough rates for Messenger digests – anywhere from 3-7% for most pages. This feature is also only available to news publishers who are registered with Facebook’s News Page Index. That’s great news for journalists – it means less competition in the Messenger Inbox. And since Facebook Messenger works across all platforms, you’re automatically reaching your followers where they already are.

Setting up the Messenger experience takes only a few minutes. Mykal Vincent from WVUE-TV has been using Messenger for years, and loves how easy it is to use on a day-to-day basis: “The beauty of SND’s Messenger bot is that you can literally set it and forget it!”

Choose Your Topics

Many newsrooms prefer a straightforward approach to setting up topics for Messenger digests. Vincent says, “We kept the user’s options simple from the get-go; Top Stories, Weather, Sports, and Weekend, and haven’t touched it since.”

You may also want to look at Post Manager, and check out what people are already clicking on – sort by Link Clicks to identify your best content. Scan the content and note what topics tend to perform best. It can vary by page audience, but we often see high-performing stories are about breaking news, weather, local food and drink, things to do, and sports. By paying attention to the content that’s getting people to take action, you’re more likely to deliver a useful digest.

Build Your Topics

Facebook will display content digests in groups of three when users are presented with the choices on a mobile device, so consider stacking your topics accordingly. The first topic you create will appear first, and so on, so keep that in mind as you’re building your Messenger topics.

There are two ways to gather content to populate the digests: by using an RSS feed, or using tagged posts in SND. You can even combine the two if you’d like content from both sources! Using tagged posts can be a great way to keep the content a little more curated, but it depends upon setting a metatag when the post is created (or adding it later in Post Manager). For the simplest setup, an RSS feed works well. SND will automatically pull the 3 most recent posts for the daily digest at the time it’s sent out.

Optional: Curate Content

As we’ve mentioned, you can use tagged posts to populate content in a daily digest. But if you’d rather just use content from an RSS feed, you can still choose content to add to Highlights. As long as you make the choices before the digest is sent out, you’ll be able to build a custom mini-newsletter for your followers. It’s a great way to add value as a source of information.

Manually curating content also allows you to recycle content that is still relevant. SND automatically only uses content that has not been sent before, but if you have evergreen content that’s still generating traffic, you can use Highlights to share it with your subscribers again.

Build Your Messenger Contacts

You wouldn’t start a newsletter without encouraging people to subscribe, and you wouldn’t launch a newscast without telling people when to watch! It’s the same for Messenger – you’ve got to build your audience of Messenger Contacts in order to start sending.

Luckily, it’s easy to start gathering sign-ups by turning on the Messenger Replies feature in Social News Desk. Anyone who leaves a comment on one of your posts will receive a Messenger invitation to subscribe to a topic digest. This is the fastest way to grow an audience of subscribers! If there’s content that you don’t want to use for Messenger Replies, you can opt-out of using the feature for that post. Anyone who organically sends a message to your page will also receive an invitation to subscribe if they haven’t already.

Vincent attributes their success with Messenger to using Messenger Replies. “The consistency of the bot reaching out to people who leave comments provides a steady flow of new subscribers and subsequent clickthroughs. It’s great to be on the forefront of news delivery through social media DMs in a way that the user has some control over.”

Promoting your Messenger Experience is also important. Get the word out with your m.me link, Facebook’s shortlink directly to a conversation with your page. The URL is almost the same as your Facebook page, with m.me in place of facebook.com.

Check On Your Progress

SND offers a clickthrough report to identify how well your content is doing on Messenger. While the audience will initially be much smaller than that of your Facebook Page’s followers, your Messenger Contacts can subscribe to multiple topics. That means you have even more opportunities to land in their inbox! The clickthrough report can also help you further hone the types of stories that are working well, so you can devote your digest content to maximize the chances of followers clicking on the story.

In the Stats tab, you can monitor the number of subscribers and subscriptions (since subscribers can get more than one digest), how your audience is growing and changing over time, and the number of new conversations initiated. You’ll also see how many blocked and reported conversations there are, if any – a good thing to keep an eye on to make sure you’re sending valuable content to your Messenger Contacts.

The post Traffic Drivers: Get More Clicks from Facebook Messenger, SND Makes it Easy first appeared on Social News Desk.

Let me back up that claim and bridge how we’re doing it.  

We work with Bridge Michigan – a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that provides passionate and rooted Michigan readers with honest, fact-driven journalism on the state’s diverse people, politics, and economy. They’re highly reliant on building their newsletter list – and they ask for donations from their loyal following. 

And, they’re getting results.

In the past few months, Social News Desk has helped Bridge Michigan get 26,115 leads at an average cost of $1.29 per lead.

We’re using their most popular content to make it happen.

Day to day, we don’t ask ask what stories they’d like to promote, we use data driven feeds to see which stories are over-performing already and push that content to get new readers. Conversely, if they have content they DO want to promote, they just let us know. We add it. 

They’re thrilled with that $1.29 per lead – it’s a solid number and lower than we are seeing industry wide. 
Our efforts to help them grow their audience do not involve more time or resources on their part – and Bridge Michigan’s Growth Strategist is pretty excited about that:

So, using Dynamic News Ads – we’ve sliced the cost in half, reduced their workload and increased results. 

I’ll list the downsides here: 

• …
• … …
• … … …

In other words, the win-win factor is hard to ignore. Grow audience, cut down cost per lead, save time, money & resources.

Ready to try out Dynamic News Ads for yourself? Social News Desk is ready to manage it for you. In fact, we encourage you to try it out for a month without longterm commitment. Hit us up – info@socialnewsdesk.com. 

The post Lead Gen Strategy: Bridging Your Best Content to Find New Audience first appeared on Social News Desk.

Local Media Foundation’s Apryl Pilolli delves into how news orgs can prepare for this upcoming change and offers solutions to what feels like a problem.

Have more questions about how to get ready? We’re always here to help – email us at info@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post Critical Changes In Content Marketing first appeared on Social News Desk.

Adding Reels to your Instagram account just got easier! Instagram Reels are now available in the SND Dashboard. And as with any social media content creation in SND, you’ll have the chance to post the Reel right away or schedule it for later.

So how do you get started using Instagram Reels in SND Dashboard? Select your Instagram account(s), add your video and then publish it. It will automatically post as a Reel. It’s the same workflow you’re used to which keeps it simple.

We wouldn’t be SND without providing a best practice or two! We suggest getting aggressive with Reels because they’re definitely a priority for Meta. The current emphasis is on Content Creators and the content being surfaced is Reels.

Instagram (and SND) also recommend you keep your videos short (less than a minute, please) and vertical (9:16). All videos that are less than 15 minutes will automatically be published as a Reel.

Reach us at support@socialnewsdesk.com with any questions!

The post Instagram Reels are now live in SND! first appeared on Social News Desk.

Reels have been available in the Instagram native platform for just about two years, and many newsrooms have already been taking advantage of this vertical short video format.

What are Reels, anyway?

Instagram Reels are vertical, 15 to 60 second short-form videos that can be created natively on Instagram or uploaded directly to Instagram from the SND Dashboard. These videos can be published to your main Instagram feed as posts and on your account grid as well as to Instagram’s Reels Tab (a special section on the Instagram app dedicated just to these short videos). We recommend publishing as both a video post and a Reel for max exposure. The best part – Instagram shows your Reels to people who don’t Follow you yet! So you’ll be more likely to reach new people and turn them into followers.

What’s so great about Reels?

Meta says that 20% of the time users spend on Instagram happens on Reels. And we’ve seen that Reels get more reach than most other pieces of content – way more. In an analysis of Instagram videos in Social News Desk, we found that on average, Reels got up to 7 times more reach than videos that were not Reels.

Ready to get started? Learn more about using Reels in Social News Desk, or reach out to our Client Success Team.

The post Hook new audiences with Instagram Reels first appeared on Social News Desk.

Philadelphia Inquirer is laser-focused on growing their top-performing newsletters. They consistently and successfully run newsletter campaigns – collect email addresses – and then immediately start sending out content-rich newsletters – all with an eye on potentially converting these readers into a paid subscription down the road.

Social News Desk is handling their lead gen campaigns using our proprietary Dynamic News Ads technology. Our goal is to make sure we’re acquiring new audiences at the lowest possible cost-per-lead.

Let’s throw out some impressive stats:

• Year-to-date, SND has driven 15,617 leads for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 
• Focus remains on their top performing e-mail newsletters which include: 
  • News Alerts Newsletter  
    • 6,552 leads at an average CPL of $0.70
    • This is their breaking news alert newsletter. 
  • Let’s Eat, Philly! Newsletter
    •  3,206 leads at an average CPL of $1.06
    • This is a local food and dining newsletter for the Philadelphia area. 
  • Sports Daily Newsletter
    •  4,278 leads at an average CPL of $0.60
    • A daily sports e-mail covering Philadelphia sports teams. 

We use corresponding, relevant content to drive sign-ups for specific newsletters.

Using top-performing content to build your newsletter WORKS. Philadelphia Inquirer is currently focused on growing its top-performing newsletters versus all of their newsletters.

“Social News Desk has been a tremendous addition to our digital transformation strategy. We’ve seen rapid growth with our audience. Not only in list size, but also attracting an array of diverse readers while continuing to maintain a significantly low cost per lead.” Terrance Young, Audience Development Marketing Manager of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Aside from SND’s Dynamic News Ads audience growth strategy, the Philadelphia Inquirer has a hub for all its newsletters on the website.

Some key takeaways:

-Focus on your top-performing newsletters – as opposed to all your newsletters.

-Consistency is key. Spend marketing dollars evenly over time.

-You can grow your audience quickly. It is possible.

Want to apply the same strategy to grow your audience? Social News Desk can help – reach out to us at info@socialnewsdesk.com.  

The post Philadelphia Inquirer’s Newsletters: Strategy Worth Picking Up first appeared on Social News Desk.

When creating an Instagram post, upload photos and videos in the order in which you’d like them to appear in your Carousel, then publish or schedule your content as usual. It’s that easy!

As with Twitter Carousels, this is a great way to tell a more complete story on social media. Whether your Instagram Carousel showcases your photographer’s best shots, the full 5-day forecast, or amazing UGC video from your fans, you’ll be able to share it all.

Be sure to pair your Instagram Carousel with a link via Newsin.bio to help your followers find the full story on your site!

Need guidance? We’re always here to help – info@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post Share more with Instagram Carousels in SND first appeared on Social News Desk.

Our Meta-certified Promotions team quickly launched a large-scale campaign that promoted local tune-in down to the ZIP code in each market, customized for the individual times that each region airs the show. In addition, we built a strategy to drive traffic through Social News Desk’s unique Dynamic News Ads technology, showcasing the best content at the best time for each person who views an ad in the campaign.

SND’s Dynamic News Ads uses a proprietary algorithm to determine which content to use, how long it should be available, and when content is no longer eligible to appear in an ad. When breaking news happens, content can appear in an ad right away – no editing and uploading necessary. In addition, our team’s Superhuman Optimization uses up-to-the-minute data and in-house custom technology to ensure campaigns are performing as expected (or better).

Overall, SND Promotions drove millions of impressions to build awareness of The National Desk’s expanded broadcast, and Sinclair Broadcasting Group was thrilled with the results.

“We were really impressed with how SND was able to push social media traffic. Our website user count more than doubled during the campaign.”

Ed Sautter, Sr. Director of Promotion & Marketing – Digital, Sinclair Broadcast Group

The National Desk website also saw more than double the amount of social referrals, sessions, and new users month over month.

If you’re interested in learning how SND Promotions can help your newsroom reach your goals, get in touch with us at info@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post SND Promotions drives huge results for Sinclair’s The National Desk first appeared on Social News Desk.

Facebook sent the update to participating newsrooms this week, letting them know that its testing over the past few years showed that tagging posts as ‘breaking news’ using the indicator didn’t increase distribution in a meaningful way. According to their announcement, “We do not expect this to impact your performance on Facebook.”

Breaking News Indicator was not ever widely available in the United States, with the “test” limited only to news organizations operating in certain markets.

The change may point to the increased importance of Facebook’s News Tab. Campbell Brown, Meta VP of global news partnerships, told Axios last fall that news publishers get about 1.8 times more distribution in the Facebook News Tab than in the News Feed, and 30% of referral traffic from Facebook is coming from the News Tab.

Meta’s recent announcement also says that their news curation team will continue to surface breaking news to promote top stories and original reporting. News organizations should also be sure they are registered in Facebook’s News Page Index to be eligible for inclusion in the Facebook News Tab.

Keep in mind that original content also tends to perform better in Facebook News Feed. The guidelines for news on Facebook remain the same, and this change means it’s a good time to review Facebook’s Content Distribution Guidelines.

If you have more questions about this change, get in touch with our Client Success Team at support@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post Facebook announces sunset of Breaking News Indicator first appeared on Social News Desk.