Columbia, Missouri
Size of Facebook audience: 1,148,136 followers as of November 13, 2016
Strategies tested (See all):
- Tell your story: Communicate your core value along with other content.
- Tell your story: Share the process of a story.
- Engage authentically: Interact like a human.
- Engage authentically: Invite and value interaction.
- Deploy your fans: Invite your users to help you inform the world.
Project lead: Kristin Rohlwing has been an engagement editor at Newsy for a little under a year, and she was responsible for this project on behalf of her newsroom. Rohlwing manages Newsy’s social media accounts and helps craft Newsy’s overall online engagement strategy. She’s passionate about public-powered journalism and building inclusive comments sections. You can connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Hear from Rohlwing about her newsroom’s goals:
Share the process of a story often worked especially well for Newsy. They used this strategy to explain editorial decisions that their audience would have questioned or been upset by, if they didn’t understand why they were made. For example, Newsy added a comment to this post to explain why their story used “American Indians” instead of “Native Americans.” Newsy also did a great job of explaining to their audience why they did certain stories in the first place. For example, one of their reporters explained why they mapped out Donald Trump’s financial ties to Vladimir Putin, and another explained why they did a story on the connection between voter ID laws and discrimination.
“My mindset while working on these strategies,” Rohlwing said, “was what is this story, why do we do it, why do we think people should care and what do we want them to walk away with?”
Communicate your value along with other content proved to be a little bit more difficult for Newsy. Rohlwing thinks that might have been because it’s difficult to be concise and digestible while also conveying the organization’s mission. But Newsy did find some success when it shared a post in support of it’s all-women social team on Women’s Equality Day. Overall, Newsy found quite a bit of success when it shared the reasoning behind some of their day-to-day editorial decisions.
