On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast we hear from Dan Russell, Reach Plc’s Engagement Director (for short). Reach Plc achieved its best ever month for traffic in January, based in no small part on a social strategy that is tailored to each platform – and doesn’t rely on chasing huge hits.
The teams across Reach’s titles have also seen success in building communities on WhatsApp where, as Russell explains, the limited nature of messaging apps can be a benefit rather than a drawback. He discusses why publishers cannot take the rarefied space of messaging apps for granted, and how the engagement team disseminates universal lessons about community growth across the entire portfolio.
Here are a few highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Laying the groundwork for use of WhatsApp
We started playing with WhatsApp in 2018, and WhatsApp was very, very different then. We thought there was something in this, and we were very quickly proven right, but the technology at the time wasn’t good enough for what we wanted to achieve. Rules around data protection and things like that were very different then as well, and it sort of fizzled out for us because the technological barriers became too big to scale what we wanted to do.
Then about roughly two years ago, WhatsApp brought out some new products. Communities was one of them, and channels was another, and because I knew the work that we’d done previously worked, I was pretty confident that we would get something out of these [newly released] products.
What audiences expect from publishers on messaging apps
WhatsApp is opt-in. You know what you’re going to get, and if you get something that isn’t that, that’s the problem.
[With] social media, Google Discover, and other platforms like Tiktok, you trip over the content. ‘I want to do something with my time,’ have a look and go scroll on a feed, swipe some videos… and you trip over the content, and you’re getting what you want.
With direct messaging, it’s different. [It’s the] same as newsletters. If you sign up for something you expect to get it. If you get something different, it’s jarring.
The ‘dance’ publishers have to do with platforms
You can’t just stop there and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got this big number [of followers]’. We need to also try and unlock that audience. And to unlock that audience you have to do a bit of a dance.
The platforms lead, and you have to dance with them and change your content – not necessarily the core of what the messaging you’re giving – but you have to change how it’s displayed, how you upload it, and things like that. So you can take one story and we can put it across several platforms, but we will have to repackage it, change it, to get the best out of that platform.
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