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.

Building a Subscriber Base – Quickly and Easily

If you’re thinking you already have enough distribution channels to manage, think again. This might be the fastest and easiest way to build a new audience. In fact, data shows 50-80% of Facebook users open Messages from businesses in their Messenger Inbox. That’s HUGE compared to the average email open rate. Plus, SND’s proprietary Messenger Replies feature automatically sends an “invitation to subscribe” as a private message to every person who comments on your newsroom’s Facebook Posts. Imagine how quickly you can rack up subscribers! (And yes, you have total control over when you want to turn that option on – or off).

Customized Content – Sent Automatically

Subscribers sign up based on the topics they care about – so you’ll be sending them customized content every day. It can be in the form of a Daily Digest, Breaking News or by topic (ie: Openings & Closings, Sports, Elections). And there’s no extra work for your team. Social News Desk pulls those stories directly from your website, automatically.

Drive Traffic and Measure Performance

We think this is all pretty cool – but you don’t have to take our word for it! SND’s Messenger dashboard will show you exactly how many clicks are coming from Messenger so you can tell what kind of traffic is coming from these new, loyal subscribers. 

New to SND? Click here for help setting up Messenger, to line up a demo or to just to learn more about Social News Desk!

The post How SND is helping newsrooms automatically distribute content through Facebook Messenger first appeared on Social News Desk.

It literally takes one second to toggle on this brand new SND feature:

Every time someone comments on a newsroom Facebook post, that person will automatically get a message in their Messenger inbox. The message is an invite from the newsroom. It allows the commenter to subscribe to receive daily news digests -from the newsroom- on topics they care about.

This brand-new tool is called Messenger Replies. In your SND Messenger settings, it’s just a simple toggle.

Once you turn it on, any Facebook user who comments on your newsroom’s Facebook post will receive a personal invitation from the newsroom to subscribe to topics they’re interested in. WAFB in Baton Rouge, La. has been testing this feature, and has seen their subscriber totals skyrocket – and most subscribers are getting digests on more than one topic!

With Messenger digests, you’re able to personally reach each subscriber with up-to-date stories they’re interested in, each and every day. And you can push breaking news alerts to your subscribers, directly to their Messenger inbox.

Ready to get set up? We can help!

The post How Local Newsrooms are Turning Facebook Comments into Subscriptions first appeared on Social News Desk.

He’s right. Data shows 50-80% of Facebook users open Messages from businesses. That’s HUGE compared to the average email open rate. Plus, as a newsroom in Facebook’s News Page Index, The Advocate/NOLA.com has access to the “Messenger Subscription Permission” which lets users sign up to receive an automatic daily digest of news from the Page each day.

It’s incredibly powerful. The Advocate has set it up so that any reader can tell them exactly which topics they care about, then – the newsroom can send that reader a handful of stories on those topics every day. And thanks to our technology at Social News Desk, it all happens automatically using RSS feeds from The Advocate’s site.

Whitfield is focused on using Messenger to build that one-on-one, personal connection with readers. But ultimately, it’s about turning those readers into subscribers: “It has to be a much more important part of our acquisition strategies. We know Facebook users don’t quite have the same loyalty as other channels – but that’s OK. When you have the Facebook follower volume, you can have less than 1% of your base convert, and that would make a huge difference in digital subscriptions.”

As more local newsrooms – both TV and newspaper – adopt this strategy and roll out Messenger support, Whitfield knows he’s in a race to win as many Messenger subscribers as possible in his market. “SND has created some out-of-the-box promo videos we plan to post natively to explain to people how to subscribe to our Messenger,” Whitfield said. “We’ll probably do some photo posts on our own, too, to help explain the process.” Social News Desk has also been working with Whitfield to test a new Messenger Replies feature which automatically sends an “invitation to subscribe” as a private message to every person who comments on the newsroom’s Timeline on Facebook. We expect this to be a very effective way to increase Messenger subscribers quickly.

While Whitfield and The Advocate/NOLA.com are working on a number of ways to diversify web traffic sources and grow subscribers, he says Messenger is something he’s extremely bullish about: “It’s certainly one way to make sure readers get the stories we think are most important to them.”

Would you like to learn more about how to set up your newsroom on Messenger? Contact us anytime!

The post How The Advocate Newspaper is Using Facebook Messenger to Gain Subscribers first appeared on Social News Desk.

Setting up Messenger is simple. Thanks to new technology released by Social News Desk. But how do you get your audience to “Connect on Messenger?” The simple answer is… Promote! Here’s how:

1. Replace “Like Us” with “Connect with Us”

Think of Messenger “Contacts” as the new “Facebook Likes.” Anywhere you’d ask for Likes – ask for Contacts instead. We all know the value of one new LIKE is pretty small compared to your overall audience these days. So why not flip the script? Instead of “LIKE US ON FACEBOOK” … say “CONNECT WITH US ON MESSENGER.”

You can make this change anywhere you have a “Like Us” button. Just replace it with a “Connect with Us” button instead… your website, apps, contests, newsletters. You name it. And have it link through to your newsroom’s Messenger chat. Facebook makes the graphic assets easy to download here.

2. Message Me Link (m.me)

So, how exactly do you link to your newsroom’s Messenger experience? Simple. Every Facebook Page has a direct m.me link that allows users to send your page a message via either the Messenger App on their mobile device, or in their browser. The link is just “m.me/[Facebook Page Handle]”.

Getting this link is really easy. Simply go to your Facebook Page, and change the “Facebook.com” to “m.me”. Test it, then copy that down and use it as a click-through link for banner ads on your website, promotional videos on Facebook, etc.

3. On-Air Promotions

If you’re a TV station, get your promotions team on-board and put together a great promo to air during newscasts or programming. Like this great promotional video from KSAT-TV in San Antonio, TX.

4. Social Video Promotion

And in case you don’t have time to create your own promo – we’ve got you covered! SND has put together a video that could work for just about any newsroom looking to promote messenger. Use our voice over, add your own, or go with music only. The video also includes an empty space at the end to include your own newsroom’s logo, talent, etc. Check it out:

These files are available to you right now. Click here for a folder with the different options. If you need further assistance with this, you can contact SND’s CMO: Elisa DeFoe!

5. Monitor Progress

You can always use your “Stats” tab in your Messenger Experience control panel in the Dashboard to monitor how many subscribers and topic subscriptions you’re building. Use this to set goals and measure your progress.

Here’s a breakdown of the different metrics:

• Topic Subscriptions: The number of topics subscribed to by your Topic Subscribers. (This number should be larger than number of Topic Subscribers, especially if you have more than one topic to choose)
• Topic Subscribers: Number of users who have subscribed to at least 1 topic.
• Total Connections: Number of contacts built by your page via Messenger.
• New Conversations: Total new conversations started on that particular date.
• Blocked Conversations: The number of users who blocked communications with your page in Messenger.
• Reported Conversations: The number of users who reported your conversation in Messenger.

The goal should be on Subscribers. Building that up, and growing your connections will help in getting more news out to more people, which means increasing your web traffic!

These are a few ideas, but we’d love to see how you’re promoting as well! If you have any questions, or need to get this set up for your newsroom, please reach out to your Client Success Manager or reach us at support@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post Local News and the new obsession with ‘Messenger Contacts’ first appeared on Social News Desk.

WKMG in Orlando, Fla. is using SND’s Facebook Messenger technology to update their Contacts regularly about new developments in the fight against Coronavirus in Florida. This technology also allows WKMG to send COVID-19 updates as push alerts which go straight to their Contacts’ Messenger inboxes and appear on the lock screen of their mobile devices.

KSAT in San Antonio, Tex. has lauched a Coronavirus-specific Messenger topic for contacts who want more frequent information. Viewers can opt-in to receive a daily digest of COVID-19 related articles from KSAT straight to their Messenger inbox.

WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla. has seen a jump in Messenger subscribers and new conversations initiated since the COVID-19 pandemic started taking shape earlier this month.

As your newsroom’s coverage continues, our Client Success team is always ready to help you set up your Messenger Experience, now in wide release for ALL SND Dashboard customers at no extra cost. Please reach out if you need any assistance with setup at support@socialnewsdesk.com

The post Newsrooms gaining audience by sending daily digest of Coronavirus news via Messenger first appeared on Social News Desk.

“The future of social is private.” – Mark Zuckerberg

First, you’ll need to register your news Page(s) in the Facebook News Page Index. The News Page Index grants news publishers access to a number of exclusive features including ‘subscription messaging.’ You can submit your request via Facebook Business Manager, after you’ve completed domain verification. Once your Page(s) are verified in the News Page Index, you’re ready to connect with your audience privately on Facebook Messenger, and send them daily digests and push alerts!

I. Create a New Messenger Experience

1. Select the SND Messenger Experience icon in the left tool bar
2. Click the “Create New Experience” button
3. Select a Facebook Page
4. Click “Save”
5. You should land on the “Settings” tab

II. Customize your Intro Message

On the “Settings” tab, you can customize the introduction message your potential subscribers will see when they send a message to your Facebook page. Users are getting this response on their mobile device, so be sure to keep it short! We suggest including information in your introduction about typing “help” to access the menu. This allows users to easily manage their alerts after subscribing. Be sure your Facebook Auto Response is turned off and that any info you were sharing there, is included in your introduction. But again, keep it as short as possible.

III. Set Up Topics (Digests)

Once your Experience is created, it’s time to create your topics!

1. Click the “New Topic” button
2. Name the topic (i.e. “Top Stories”; “Sports”; “Weather”; etc.)
3. Set the time you want the digest to go out for your topic. (Users may subscribe to multiple topics, so we recommend you schedule topics at a minimum of 5 minutes apart.)
4. Set the maximum age of the content you want to send out (in hours). (If there is no content under this age available, no digest will send)
5. Enter the RSS feed from which your digest will populate content.
6. Click “Add”. This will validate the RSS feed.
7. Click SAVE (This step is really important!)
8. Verify your topics are working by clicking on the “Content” tab

IV. Go Live!

Switch the “Status” button to Live. (Note: If your Messenger Experience will not go live, be sure your Page is registered in the News Page Index.)

Once live, users can connect via Facebook Messenger to receive daily digests AND push alerts. Check out a walkthrough of what your users will experience once subscribed to a topic below.

Messenger Contacts are your new Facebook likes. Promote the Messenger experience just as you have promoted your Facebook Page and try to rack up as many Messenger Contacts as you can. Check out KSAT-TV’s promo below.

>> How your newsroom can send push alerts via Facebook Messenger

After the initial setup process you can set it and forget it OR manage topics from the Content tab.

This feature is NOW available to all users of SND Dashboard! If you have any questions or need help with setup, reach out to us at support@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post Go live with SND’s Facebook Messenger technology in just a few easy steps first appeared on Social News Desk.

GUEST BLOG: My Take on Messenger

By Mykal Vincent, WAFB Digital Content Producer

The SND messenger experience is essentially a bot that engages a user when they send your brand’s Facebook page a direct message. The bot guides the user through a series of prompts and instructions to subscribe to one or more content topics. Daily, the bot will send the desired digests to subscribers through Facebook messenger.

As a member of SND’s Test Drive Team, I was selected to test and provide feedback for a new feature Social News Desk has been developing; a Facebook messenger experience. I was hooked the moment Savannah and the SND team showed me the demonstration. I’m not much of a gambling man, but I’d be willing to bet there are some certified geniuses working behind the scenes there. I wanted my hands in this tech.

I work for a local news station now, but I have a background in website development and graphic design. As part of SND’s Test Drive Team, I was presented an opportunity to influence the backend, the coding, and the user interface. I felt like my unique knowledge of coding and design, coupled with my daily workflow as a digital content news producer would lend a useful hand.

First impressions

At first glance, it was the shiniest new toy I’d gotten since I was a child. Simply knowing that I was looking at something only limited number of eyes could see, and that I was going to be able to use a new feature that wasn’t available to the public gave me heart eyes and a sense of responsibility. I puffed my chest out, pulled open my email, and wrote a letter to my boss.

“I’m going to be working on something BIG,” I penned.

I wanted the news department and the sales department in on this. Ever since I set foot in our newsroom, I noticed that we were drastically behind the ball as far as social media content creation and distribution. Our strategies were (and still are) dated compared to industry-leading content creators and influencers.

This feature was our chance to get in on the ground floor of an emerging platform – direct messaging.

Immediately, I sat down my department heads and our digital sales team to let them know about the new feature.

I’d seen it been done before. I have used a similar service, Cleo, to check my bank account and monitor my budget. I wanted to let my entire station know how big of a deal it was to be developing this feature for our station. Our competitors weren’t there. This would be a homerun win for us. Free push alerts just for linking SND with our RSS feeds.

I’m surprised SND wasn’t charging us an arm AND a leg for the amount of traffic we will undoubtedly be funneling to our website through this feature.

But direct messaging meant one thing for this digital content nerd; notifications.

The Coveted Lock Screen

According to Apple, I spend an average of 4.5 hours a day staring at my cell phone screen. I pick my phone up over 100 times a day and see 60+ notifications come across my lock screen.

One major part of my job is making sure that my station’s content is several of those notifications throughout a day. Traditionally, we do that by sending push alerts through our news app. These can be breaking news, weather, and traffic alerts, to name a few. We strive to be on that lock screen early and often.

The SND messenger feature was going to give us an automated opportunity to be even more present on our viewers’ lock screens and in their DMs.

Keyword: AUTOMATED.

Effort vs. Reward

I stress to my superiors and my coworkers the importance of balancing the amount of effort we’re putting into pieces of content versus the reward we get out of it. How hard are we working on a story or a graphic and what are we going to get in return? Are we putting enough effort into sponsored content and into developing potentially sponsorable content? How much time are our producers spending on projects and why?

This automated Facebook bot was going to give us huge upside for little to no effort. Using RSS feeds to automatically distribute our content to users without even having to write a Facebook post or a tweet was a win-win in my book. Sign me up for more content on more lock screens for no additional effort outside of setting it up.

Sign. Me. Up.

Launch Day

I set up some topics, plugged in some default responses, flipped the switch from red to green and watched our bot, aptly named Rosie, take over our direct messages.

It wasn’t pretty at first. We deliberated before we made it live. The digests sent out of order, at random, and sometimes not at all. Bumps which were somewhat expected because – after all – we were part of the beta test.

Despite that, an unexpected upside to this Facebook messenger bot was noticeable as soon as we turned it on. The bot helped filter out some of the most common questions our social media producers have to field on a daily basis. Now, telling a user to send in their news tips to our newsroom email address happened instantaneously the moment they contacted us. The social media team could focus on replying to the more complicated requests. It was immediately improving our productivity.

But there was work to be done, still, and the Test Drive Team was undaunted.

Feedback & Feedback & Feedback

To be completely fair, I couldn’t see what other test drivers were suggesting to the team. I could only see correspondence between myself and the developers at SND, so I’m not exactly sure how frequently other test drivers were making their hotlines bling.

For the first month or so, looking back at my emails, I rarely went more than 2-3 days without ringing up Social News Desk with something else for them to put on their radar.

Even when I felt like I was bogging the team down with suggestions; anything from the color of a border on iOS in dark mode, to pointing out bugs I noticed while exhausting the features, the team responded quickly. The bugs were identified and remedied. I’m telling you; geniuses.

It’s Aliiiiiive!

I remember the first day all of our digests sent out in order and on time. I celebrated! High fives all around. A few weeks into it and I was elated seeing the digests come across my lock screen every day at the pre-determined times. Thanks to this feature, our brand could wrap around a trio of stories, or a weather event and be present on that coveted lock screen.

One of our goals throughout the day is to have our lead stories on air mirror our top stories on our website and the stories we post to social media. If you watched our Noon, 5:00 or 6:00 show, you should be able to find the story you just watched on a digital platform. This new feature was helping us expand that vision to our viewers’ Facebook inboxes.

Success on all fronts.

In Conclusion

Since our launch in early November, we’ve had nearly 250 people subscribe to over 300 content topics. That’s an extra 250 people receiving our web stories in a personal message at least once a day, every day. This feature will give us a new demographic to look at, a new user base to target, and plenty of opportunity to strategize what gets sent to those inboxes.

Overall, I’m thrilled with new feature, and pleased to be a part of the team developing it. I’m especially excited for the potential of a breaking news element that will allow us to fast track the latest breaking stories directly to our subscribers.

The best part about it all? Bypassing the news feed algorithm! No longer will our reach and potential engagement be dependent on Facebook’s mysterious criteria. You want to read our stories? Subscribe and you shall. You think it’d be that easy for the 300,000+ people who like our Facebook page, but I digress. Thanks to the geniuses at SND, news feed algorithms are a thing of the past!

Once again, hats off to the team – er, our team? – at Social News Desk for developing such a useful tool. I don’t envision us ever turning this feature off moving forward. I can’t wait to see what those geniuses are cooking up next and I hope I get the opportunity to test that feature, too.

This preceding post is a guest blog written by Mykal Vincent, WAFB Digital Content Producer. And no, we didn’t ask him to call us geniuses. But we’ll take it. Thanks Mykal!

The post WAFB-TV Among First Local Newsrooms with Messenger Subscription Strategy first appeared on Social News Desk.

As the COVID-19 pandemic expands, journalists in local newsrooms are working hard to keep their communities informed. And although it’s brand new – (wide release slated for late March) – we’re already seeing dozens of newsrooms embrace SND’s Facebook Messenger technology to keep information flowing and send urgent updates when necessary.

Our SND Test Drive Team got early access to this new Social News Desk feature and have been sending daily digests to Messenger subscribers for several months. Now, as the pace of pandemic-coverage increases, we’re seeing those newsrooms sending push-alert updates on how coronavirus is affecting their communities.

While many of our newsroom-users are sending coronavirus updates through their Top Stories digests, it’s also easy to set up a topic feed specifically for COVID-19 coverage – even if you don’t have an RSS feed dedicated to the topic on your website.

In SND’s Messenger Experience Settings tab, click “New Topic” and give your topic a name. Set the time and maximum content age – for a rapidly changing story, you may want a lower threshold for your content’s age. Now, instead of an RSS feed, enter your desired tag into the Tags field. Don’t forget to save your new topic.

As you post content related to your topic, use the Tags field to identify the story as part of that topic. Keep in mind that you can add multiple metatags to a story. You can also add tags from Post Manager to stories you have already sent.

As you publish stories to your page with the selected tag, they will populate in your Content tab in SND’s Messenger Experience. From here, you can let the digest automatically select stories that you’ve published, or add stories to the highlights by clicking on them in the “Available Content” section. You can also drag and drop your highlights into the desired order.

If a major update happens, you can also send a push alert to your subscribers – either all subscribers, just those for certain topics, or a single topic. The push alert can contain a link, or it can be a text-only alert. Keep in mind that messages should be non-promotional and relevant, according to Facebook’s rules.

And because of the way the native Messenger app interacts with most mobile devices, these push alerts will show up on the lock screen of the device…adding extra visibility.

If you don’t yet have access to SND’s Messenger Experience, contact your Client Success Manager or reach out to us at support@socialnewsdesk.com to get early access. We’ll be happy to help you set it up so you can keep your viewers informed.

The post Newsrooms are using SND’s FB Messenger technology to send #COVID19 updates first appeared on Social News Desk.

Facebook Messenger has set aside a very powerful feature called “Subscription Messaging” for use ONLY by news pages. To gain access, your page must be listed in the News Page Index. Once your page is whitelisted for this capability in Messenger, its possible for you to allow your audience to subscribe to receive updates from you via Messenger automatically. Social News Desk’s new Messenger Experience feature in SND Dashboard provides the technology to make it happen.

Using SND’s Messenger Experience, your newsroom can send a daily news digest each morning to anyone who subscribes AND you can also send “push alerts” anytime your editorial team thinks it’s warranted. Imagine the opportunities this presents for breaking news, weather, sports, traffic and other topics. A few clicks inside the SND Messenger Experience and you can send important info straight to the audience, it’s really that simple:

1. Choose ‘Send Push Alert’ from the Content tab to get started

2. Select your audience and push alert type

Audience: You can send to all subscribers, or subscribers of certain topics like “Sports.”
Push Alert types: You can send a link (to your website), text only, or get creative and do a combination.
Reminder: Facebook does have rules for sending these alerts. Messages should be non-promotional, relevant news.

3. Customize your push alert

The title and description for links can be edited, and you can upload a different thumbnail. If you opt for text only, just type your message and a link if you’d like. We recommend creating a style guide so that your push alerts are consistent and effective.

4. Send

These alerts will show up right in the user’s Messenger inbox. And will look like a continuation of the communication between your newsroom page and them. What’s even more powerful is that new Messages generally appear on the lock screen of most mobile devices. So you’ll really get the user’s attention:

What makes a good push alert? What makes a story worthy of a push alert? It is important to review both your strategic and tactical approach to Messenger push alerts. Is there compelling content associated with the story? Is there a new or urgent update? Is the story exclusive? Should the title or description have keywords in all-caps such as ‘BREAKING’ or ‘TRAFFIC ALERT’? Has the story been sent as a push alert recently? As always, consider the value of the push alert to your subscribers and spell-check before sending!!!

Push alerts can be beneficial for your subscribers, when timely and done right. You should review your push alert strategy and best practices for your mobile app, and consider applying it to Messenger push alerts.

To learn more, reach out to us at support@socialnewsdesk.com.

The post How your newsroom can send push alerts via Facebook Messenger first appeared on Social News Desk.