Clarín has found success by quickly adapting to reader habits, including off-site reading, as their hugely popular social network shows. It’s no wonder that with more than 20 million unique visitors every month, according to Comscore, Clarín.com is one of the most visited media sites in Argentina.
We asked Fernanda Brovia, Clarín’s Social Media Manager, how she uses Chartbeat to continue growing the outlet’s social networks and take advantage of them as a vital source of traffic for the website.
Tell us a bit about Clarín’s social networks and your role as Social Media Manager.
We have the privilege of being one of the largest media communities in Argentina. Within our networks, the most popular is Facebook, where we have more than 6.7 million followers. On Twitter, we reach 3 million followers, and on Instagram almost 1 million. We are also working hard on our LinkedIn and Telegram presence.
I lead the Social Media team, under the Mass Content department. We work closely with the SEO, Latest News, Video, Photography, and Design teams, with the aim of creating the most effective content publishing strategy. This is where we use Chartbeat.
The Real-time Dashboard gives us the gift of sight — I can filter data by direct traffic, in order to know what the public is looking for organically, and by social traffic, to find out the most popular articles by channel.
As the head of social media, what’s the first thing you look for on Chartbeat every day?
On the way to the newsroom, I take a look at the Chartbeat app on my phone. It gives me a general idea of site traffic for the day, and in the office I open the Real-time Dashboard to see the data in more detail. The Real-time Dashboard gives us the gift of sight — I can filter data by direct traffic, in order to know what the public is looking for organically, and by social traffic, to find out the most popular articles by channel.
This helps us understand who the audience is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., identify the best times to publish, and generate the appropriate content strategy for each platform. Chartbeat plays a big role in our decision making.
What general trends have you seen in terms of content consumption by each social platform?
We experiment a lot and have a multi-channel re-posting strategy, but we generally see Facebook reading a lot of celebrity, politics, society, sports, and life stories.
On Twitter, the interest is more specific towards politics, society, and police articles, while on Instagram we post a lot about entertainment. Each network’s audience is different and Chartbeat helps make informed conclusions.
How do you use data to establish your re-posting strategy?
Evergreen content is very important to us because it allows us to maximize the value of our content and experiment with its distribution. Using the Historical Dashboard, we understand what the most popular articles were for the week, or month, in direct and social traffic.
With that information, we repost articles in different channels, always through a different lens. For example, we experiment with different titles and photos for the same article, with the goal of making the story attractive to various social channels. Chartbeat’s ‘Offsite Social’ integration with CrowdTangle plays a key role in streamlining this workflow by telling how audiences are directly interacting with our content.
(For more on this topic, see: Give stories new life: How to optimize content when ‘zombies’ emerge)
Clarín is also experimenting with subscriptions. How do you see social networks as an effective vehicle to attract subscribers?
Clarín closed out 2019 with 200,000 subscribers, thanks to excellent cross-functional teamwork, where Social Media was heavily involved. Last October, we implemented a subscriptions campaign around political op-ed pieces, mostly via Facebook and Instagram.
We’re constantly experimenting with user segments with a propensity to read specific content, applying different paywall rules with them and monitoring results.
The campaign — which took place during General Election month in Argentina — yielded positive results, and one was one of the first steps we took to boost conversions via social media. Furthermore, we’re constantly experimenting with user segments with a propensity to read specific content, applying different paywall rules with them and monitoring results.
What are five things you would recommend doing within Chartbeat to any social media team?
- Download the Chartbeat app, to stay informed at any time
- Configure Spike Alerts to receive notifications via email or text when an article has higher traffic than normal
- Subscribe to a Daily Site Report, to receive a morning email with the traffic summary for the previous day, including articles with high engagement on social
- Look at the Offsite Social for individual articles, to see where readers are sharing and commenting on your stories
- Watch the Search traffic filter just as closely as the Social filter. It tells you what the audience is looking for organically, so you can then promote those stories on social if you haven’t done so.
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