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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not available for all Facebook Pages <yet>, and you might still be on the Classic Page – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!

So, what should you expect when it’s your turn? Facebook says that all Page content will automatically move to your new Page when it’s switched. Page followers will transition, and you won’t lose your Page verification. Awesome! 

But (isn’t there always a but!) here’s what else you need to know about the New Pages Experience: 

• If someone only likes your Page but does not follow it, the likes will not transition to your new Page. More on likes and follows.
  
• Anyone who was previously an admin on the Page will have the same access after switching
  
• There are two different types of access to manage the Page – Facebook Access (which can have Full or Partial Control) and Task Access. Users need to have Facebook Access with Full Control in order to add and maintain the connection of the Page to SND.
  
• Speaking of which, it’s a good idea to reattach your Facebook and Instagram accounts in SND if you did happen to switch to the new Page experience   

The transition has been less than smooth so far. We’ve seen some discrepancies with enabling the Breaking News Indicator and have found the connection between Instagram and the new Page to be problematic.

If you’d rather not tackle these changes with the New Pages Experience or aren’t digging it at the moment, you do have the option to switch back to Classic Pages.  Consider it a temporary reprieve though, as change is (inevitably) coming.

Have more questions about the New Pages Experience? Get in touch with us at support@socialnewsdesk.com – we’ll be happy to help.

The post Facebook’s New Pages Experience? What Newsrooms Must Know! first appeared on Social News Desk.

SOCIAL RANKINGS BY SOCIAL NEWS DESK

Download for iOS

Download for Android

Within a market, you can see how each newsroom is performing, as well as rankings for talent pages. (Yes, we rank every reporter, anchor, meteorologist and writer in the market. And if you don’t see your page, or if you’ve moved to a new market recently, let us know!)

If you work with multiple markets, you can favorite as many markets as you like – making it easy to find the locations you need to keep an eye on. Better yet, your favorites view will show the top three newsrooms at a glance! You can also tap into the market to view the detailed rankings for each newsroom.

Get the FREE Social Rankings app today! Download now for iOS, or download the app for Android. Be sure to leave us a rating and let us know how the ALL NEW app is working for you!

The post The ALL NEW Social Rankings App is Here! first appeared on Social News Desk.

Why Newsletters?

Newsletters are one of the best ways to build a long-lasting relationship with your audience – and it comes straight to their inbox. The format also gives your writers an opportunity to show their personality in a way they can’t on your website or on TV. Niche newsletters also offer a platform to showcase your expertise and depth of coverage.

Although the online channel is still an important means to publish and deliver the news, a website is an endless stream of information, while newsletters have a beginning and an end and summarize the day.

Jason Hegna, vice president of sales at Shaw Media

Content Matters

Both general and niche newsletters have a place in your strategy. Morning and afternoon headline newsletters tend to have a larger audience, and there is enough content to support delivery every day. However, niche newsletters tend to have a much more engaged audience. When choosing topics, be sure that there is already a proven level of interest, the ability to expand your coverage, and the ability to add your voice to the conversation around the topic.

Hearst Newspapers’ Marketing Specialist, Sierra Smith says the company has seen success with niche topics like food and recipes, crime and courts, cannabis coverage, travel, local history and sports. While WDIV-TV’s Digital Special Projects Manager, Ken Haddad says his station offers several sports-focused newsletters to subscribers in the Detroit market, each with its own dedicated fanbase built in.

Growing Your Audience

Haddad and Smith go on to suggest that newsrooms take a multi-pronged approach to promoting newsletters, including paid acquisition campaigns, targeted on-site units, specific sign-up pages on your website, and for TV stations – using the megaphone of on-air promotion. Cross-promote your newsletters between one another, and in other media such as podcasts and livestreams. Don’t forget about referrals! The better your audience knows you, the more likely they will be to share your newsletter with their families and friends.

Make Sign-ups Simple

Using SND’s Dynamic News Ads technology in partnership with the SND Promotions team, newsrooms can leverage their highest-performing social content into targeted ads that reach the right person, with the right content, at the right time. While Dynamic News Ads can be used for almost any newsroom objective (including SMS signups and Tune In), we’ve seen huge success and low costs in gathering newsletter leads for publishers.

The sign-up flow for Dynamic News Ads is so simple that users only have to click a button. Facebook pre-fills information in the form, so your users will be signed up and on your site in no time. SND can even help automate leads to your CRM, so you don’t have to manually add users to your subscriber lists.

Decide What Success Looks Like

How will you know when your strategy is working? Be sure to measure your progress as you go. Decide what KPIs are most important to your organization – is it the lifetime value of a subscriber, or increasing unique email addresses acquired?

Once you’ve defined your goals, check in with your campaign’s performance. If you’re running ads in support of growing subscriptions, take note of which newsletters are gaining the most sign-ups at the most competitive cost, or driving the most paid subscriptions. Don’t be afraid to shift budget as you learn more about your users’ habits.

Pro tip: TV stations are seeing lower costs per lead right now because broadcasters are somewhat new to the newsletter game when compared to print publishers. So if you’re not running newsletter promotions, now is the time!

Want to talk? Email us to set up a call anytime.

The post Top 5 Newsletter Audience Acquisition Strategies That REALLY Work first appeared on Social News Desk.

WDIV’s Digital Special Projects Editor, Ken Haddad says creating an email newsletter is all about that one on one experience… “The better you build that relationship with those users…you continue to build that credibility and that trust and they continue to come back to you. And eventually you’ll be able to drive revenue through this platform because those users are continually using your products.”

For many TV Newsrooms, creating an email newsletter is uncharted territory. But there are resources available including this TVNewsCheck How To video series featuring Haddad. Once you have the basics set up, the big question is … how do you get people to subscribe to your newsletter?

Self-Promote

Leverage your existing resources by promoting your newsletter in the newscast, on your website and via station promos. The best part about this approach is that it’s low/no cost to the station. But it’s also not always the most effective.

Acquisition Ads

By far, the most effective way to increase subscribers for an email newsletter is through acquisition ads on Facebook. This approach minimizes friction by offering the Facebook user an instant opportunity to sign up for your newsletter without even leaving their Facebook News Feed.

While effective, acquisition ads are anything but simple – and can be expensive if you’re not running them correctly. So when WDIV wanted to increase its email subscribers, the station turned to Social News Desk to manage its Acquisition Ads investment on Facebook.

Case Study

Dynamic News Ads is Social News Desk’s proprietary ad tech – you could call it the secret sauce. It’s why more than 1000 newsrooms around the world rely on SND to manage acquisition ads for their email newsletter campaigns – including WDIV.

Over the course of a single month campaign, SND was able to generate nearly 7500 new email subscribers at an average cost of just $0.34 per lead (or per email acquired). For comparison, the industry standard is to keep this cost under $1.00 per lead and when WDIV ran it’s own campaigns, it was averaging about $0.90 per lead.

“Newsletters are a huge part of our digital revenue strategy going forward. Sponsorships, branded content and partnerships are all possible when you build up a large, engaged audience – and Social News Desk’s technology has proven to be the absolute best way to quickly and cost-effectively grow our list of subscribers.”

Bob Ellis, VP/GM WDIV-TV (Detroit, MI)

So why are SND’s email newsletter sign-up campaigns so much more effective? It’s that secret sauce – our Dynamic News Ads (DNA). This complex algorithm automatically identifies your newsroom’s best content and uses it to build the best ad in real time.

WDIV ran three campaigns for three separate newsletters. Each campaign was tailored by SND to include only applicable content. So for example, ads promoting signups for the station’s “Help Me Hank” newsletter exclusively featured related consumer-advice content. This approach is critical to the success of the campaign, as it shows the user exactly what they can expect to receive when they sign up for the newsletter.

Notably, SND’s DNA technology can also eliminate content you don’t want to see in an ad such as politics or promotional content. And we do it all in real time and automatically rotate in the best stories while rotating out the ones that aren’t performing. The result is a quickly growing list of subscribers at a cost well below the value those subscribers will represent for your brand in the future.

Want to find out how to increase your email newsletter subscribers? Reach out to our team anytime!

The post WDIV-TV rolls out forward-thinking newsletter strategy to acquire new digital audience. first appeared on Social News Desk.

To create a Twitter Carousel, create a new post and select a Twitter account. Click the “Add Twitter Carousel” option under the Post Text box.

Add your first link in the Website URL field. SND will automatically scrape the metadata from the URL. You can customize the headline for the Twitter Carousel item. If you wish to upload a custom thumbnail or a video, click the Upload button. You may need to crop the thumbnail image to conform to Twitter’s guidelines. Keep in mind that you can use all photos or all videos, but you cannot mix media types in a Twitter Carousel.

To add additional items to your Twitter Carousel, click the Add More button. If you have multiple Twitter Carousel items, you can reorder them by dragging and dropping using the 6-dot handle on the left side.

The post How to use Twitter’s new ‘Carousels’ feature for organic Tweets first appeared on Social News Desk.