“Sharing content on social is the online equivalent of carrying the newspaper under your arm” – FT social media manager
Acting fast in response to a story is essential for the Financial Times in terms of social, according to the publisher’s social media manager Rebecca Watts.
“Sometimes that means quickly setting up a paid ad campaign to promote a scoop before anybody else breaks the news. We often don’t get a lot of notice and the time pressure that comes with that is challenging and exciting,” she said.
Watts, one of the judges for this year’s Social Buzz awards in association with iomart, believes that creativity and innovation are important in a social campaign, and it is exactly this that she plans to look for, adding that great campaigns “should deliver real value for the business it represents over and above word-of-mouth”.
Describing engagement as ‘critical’ for social, Watts adds: “Our priority is driving traffic to stories but engagement feeds visits. Sharing FT content on social networks is the online equivalent of carrying the newspaper under your arm and the ultimate peer-to-peer recommendation. However, engagement comes in many forms and we pay attention to comments on our stories, page views, attendance at our conferences plus many other things.”
As the focus for Financial Times is breaking news, Twitter is where the FT gets most of its traffic from, while highly visual pieces with beautiful video or photography play out really well on Facebook.
Watts states that Twitter’s paid ad model to reach new audiences and drive subscriptions, adding “We also make one piece free daily just for social media and our videos are free to view. This helps give new audiences a flavour of our content before subscribing.”
However, the social media manager points out, the way that people are viewing content is ‘fundamentally’ changing, something that Watts puts down to the rise in mobile.
“Young people don’t visit news websites, they see what’s being shared on social media, on their phones,” she explains, adding that in Spain, 26 per cent of people use WhatsApp for news discovery.
If you feel your social campaign will impress Watts, enter it into the Social Buzz Awards by 13 August.