If you've spent time pulling together a multimedia story, carefully considered your structure and the flow of your narrative – it is important that you also give consideration to what happens after you hit publish.
While you may have created a hugely engaging story, if you don't actively promote it among your networks, and wider online communities, you run the risk of it not getting noticed among the noise of everything else. Especially if the 'everything else' is getting some love in the way of promotion.
In the online world you've got to be the newspaper seller, positioning your content in the right places, at the right times and in the right way.
On social media
Think about how quickly your social media timeline updates with new posts. Even if you regularly visit the network throughout the day, unless you work in social media monitoring and are watching non-stop, there's likely to be a lot that you're missing. So as the content creator, how can you aim to be in the right place, at the right time?
TIMING
Firstly, think about the time of day. Much research has been carried out into when different networks are most active, both on a general basis and there are also tools that help people analyse and understand their own specific networks.
Just a Google search of 'time to tweet twitter' surfaces much insight into the subject. This article by Social Times features an infographic from Quick Sprout, outlining the 'best times' and days to share content across a number of social networks. Remember your Twitter community is not the same as that on Facebook etc.
But it also flags the importance of viewing this in the frame of what you're doing. Consider the sort of content, for example, that you're promoting and the potential audience for it. Another important point is where you are, versus where your audience may be. If your work is of interest to an international audience, consider different timezones you may need to target. Check out the tools suggested by Shoutmeloud.com here.
This post by Hootsuite offer further tips on how to better understand optimum times to share content with your own networks, and importantly stresses the need for this to be applied alongside thoughtful sharing. Invest in your community, and then when the time comes, it's more likely they'll want to invest their time in you. As the post states:
"If you're just publishing content and not engaging, your followers will also not take the action to engage with your tweet"
Kristina Cisnero, Hootsuite
CONTENT
The wording is also important. If you can create conversations around your content on social networks, in a way that feels appropriate to those environments, it will feel inviting for a user to engage. Meltwater explains here how they adapt their strategy based on network.
And exactly what works for your communities will depend on the content at hand, so the most important thing is to learn from what you're doing. You might not crack the best strategy from the word go, but by starting to experiment, you can start to learn. Of course success will also be story specific to a fair degree, but if you can also spot any patterns across stories then that is hugely valuable information.
Beyond the headline, consider sharing key quotes, key developments in the narrative, emotive lines from the narrative, a question that the story will answer etc. Also consider relevant hashtags that may help the tweet reach someone particularly interested in that subject / person / event.
A great suggestion by BBC Travel in this previous Insights post, was to consider how you'd tell a friend. Consider what you would immediately think of when talking about it in a social environment. That's what we're dealing with after all!
And of course, don't necessarily just share words. If you're telling visually-beautiful stories – give your networks a taste of that.
Attaching an image to a tweet has been proven to help boost click-through and engagement. And you don't have to limit yourself to the images from your story. Some great tweet examples are below, showing different ways of delivering visuals in tweets beyond a single image, as well as different use of wording, to engage through emotion, instruction, question & answer and curiosity.
As for what size to make your image for Twitter, there's a comprehensive guide by Visually here (spotted via a Journalism.co.uk post from last year). Disclaimer: I was previously editor of Journalism.co.uk.
On own sites / apps
Of course it's not just about social networks. For example, what are you planning on your own site to ensure any interested readers will see your story at launch, and later?
Knowing where and how to display the story on your own site is the next question – and is where your analytics are a powerful tool in guiding strategy. Where are your readers discovering your content? Do you still have a decent number of readers coming to your homepage, for example? If so, think carefully about how your stories – particularly those with a decent shelf-life, can be found on the homepage longer-term. If you have access to heatmap technology, you can drill down even further into the 'hotspots' on your main website pages.
What about on your apps? Perhaps you have data you can use to understand if there is a certain content that's particularly popular on your specific properties.
For news sites/apps, often more in-depth, or multimedia-style stories get quickly pushed off the homepage or landing page by more regular breaking news articles. So consider ways to keep them available to interested audiences in the weeks to come. That may include:
• if your story is particularly visual, giving people a visual taster as well as with a text snippet that will gain click-through (again, think beyond the headline – which they will see when they click anyway!)
• creating a new (or harnessing an existing) section on longer-reads or multimedia for those who want to specifically seek out that sort of content, where you can keep an archive of this material for finding later on. And remember to specifically promote that section elsewhere on the site/app(s), social, email etc
• point to other long-form / multimedia reads at the end of newer, similar content
• keep an eye on traffic to the story, and if it starts to peak, consider re-adding to homepage/app, if offers helpful context on a new related story (as well as re-promoting on other channels too e.g. social etc).
Have your own tips / lessons you can share?
That's just a snippet of the opportunities to promote stories to online communities.
If you have any other tips to share on the subject, whether it's more insight on connecting with communities on social or own site, as above, or effective strategies when sharing with other networks altogether, please get in touch. I am @rachelabartlett on Twitter.
If you're interested in using Shorthand for immersive storytelling, find out more on the Shorthand Pro website.
