A Plus

New York, New York

Size of Facebook audience: 542,369 followers as of Nov. 13, 2016

Strategies tested (See all):

  1.     Tell Your Story: Communicate your core value in stand-alone posts.
  2.     Tell Your Story: Communicate your core value along with other content.
  3.     Engage Authentically: Interact like a human.
  4.     Engage Authentically: Share yourself and the process.
  5.     Engage Authentically: Host meaningful conversation.
  6.     Engage Authentically: Invite and value interaction.

Project Lead: Abby Rogers, who was the lead social media editor at A Plus from April 2015-October 2016. She is now a senior editor with the company. During her time as the lead social media editor, she oversaw A Plus’ social presence, created a social video presence and used A Plus’ content to help influencers grow their social media presence. You can connect with her via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Hear from Rogers about her newsroom’s experience:

With an already strong Facebook following, A Plus focused their attention on getting their audience to be more engaged with their content. They wanted to build an online community that understands, interacts and is a partner in their mission to create inspiring journalism.

A Plus’s Facebook videos performed really well in general. For communicate your value strategies, this video with Isaac Mosh and this video with Frida Ottesen both had incredible reach. Both generated a significant amount of conservation. Under interact like a human, another Isaac Mosh video did incredibly well. It, again, had a huge reach like the first Isaac Mosh video mentioned of over 800,000 people. Under invite and value interaction, a video on Comedy for Chloe reached nearly 1 million people and generate a lot of engagement.

Two stories (this and this) under communicate your core value along with other content didn’t perform as well as expected. Both posts are text heavy and have generic photos. It’s possible that the engagement for both of these posts was so low because the value got lost in the text, and the photo didn’t grab attention. This Fourth of July post under invite and value interaction had low engagement, as well. The post was published on July 5, instead of before the holiday. It goes to show how important timeliness is for engagement.