Ogden, Utah
Size of Facebook audience: 30,650 followers as of November 13, 2016
Strategies tested (See all):
- Tell Your Story: Introduce your organization and your staff to your users.
- Tell Your Story: Share the process of a story.
- Engage Authentically: Host meaningful conversation.
- Engage authentically: Invite and value interaction.
Project lead: Ann Elise Taylor is the news editor at the Standard-Examiner, where she’s worked for about a year now, and was her newsroom’s lead on this project. She manages a four-person digital team and leads audience engagement and innovation efforts. You can connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Hear from Taylor about her newsroom’s goals:
The host meaningful conversation strategy was consistently successful for the Standard-Examiner, but invite and value interaction proved a little bit harder to pull off. The Tell Your Story strategies were hit or miss.
Going into this experiment, the Standard-Examiner really wanted to embrace the conversational aspect of social media and use their Facebook presence to build relationships, not just push links. To do this, they introduced their audience to their newsroom with this staff Q&A and photo album; empowered their followers to initiate and join in important conversations with their #SEFaceToFace series; utilized Facebook as a customer service tool by inviting users to share complaints; and took their users behind the scenes to show them a photographer’s creative process.
The Standard-Examiner pushed themselves to get involved in the comments and ask commenters follow-up questions, and that was really successful for them considering they’d often get the same user to comment on the same post multiple times. Reporters frequently responded to comments, asked questions and furthered the conversation, and that kind of involvement was powerful when coupled with the social media strategies they were testing.
“I think I learned that if we are willing to take the time to engage with [our users] and ask them questions in the right way,” Taylor said, “they are more than willing to respond and talk to one another. I think that I learned that they’re a lot more willing to have a conversation with us and engage with us than I maybe even thought they were.”