Upping The Ante With Social Media

Even though KNBC Los Angeles is a continent away, it found itself right on top of the Boston Marathon bombings that shook the nation on April 15.

“Our anchor Alycia Lane was within feet of the bomb and sent us phone video, which we immediately put on Facebook. Over 330,000 people saw that post,” says Sara Catania, KNBC’s editorial director for digital media. “It was really moving. It connected those folks with what she was seeing and feeling. That is really the value of social media.”

“Social media began as just an opportunity to engage informally,” adds Catania. “It has evolved into a great way to convey information quickly and efficiently, especially on Twitter.”

Like KNBC, most broadcasters now get it.

To keep pace in the world of digital media, they know they must figure out how to use social media effectively for promotion and news. And some claim they have.

Over the past few years, these social media-savvy broadcasters have developed strategies and best practices for exploiting the two most popular social media — Facebook and Twitter — in ways that may be yielding higher ratings and more revenue.

“If you can get one more rating point in viewership, that translates to real money,” says Brian Handley, CEO of StepLeader, the Capitol Broadcasting subsidiary that builds digital marketing solutions for stations. “Incremental increase in TV viewership. That’s where social media can have the greatest impact.”

“We only have anecdotal data to demonstrate that social media increases ratings,” says Jaime Sawyer, director of social media, Raycom Media. “But during May sweeps we’ve seen Raycom stations win in newscasts where they haven’t before.”

RIDING THE SOCIAL MEDIA TSUNAMI

There is no denying social media’s impact on society in general and television in particular.

Twitter claims some 555 million active users, and, according to the Pew Research Center, 8% of online adults in the U.S. use Twitter daily — double the number from the year before. In the past year, Facebook’s “daily active users” have grown from 552 million to 655 million worldwide, including 39% of the population of the United States and Canada.

But although more than 60% of TV viewers report using social media while watching TV, only 30% of that time is spent engaging with or talking about the TV content. “Most often, that ‘second screen’ use of smartphones and tablets is a distraction,” says Mike Bloxham, executive director of the Media Behavior Institute.

What’s more, Bloxham adds, only 2% of total TV viewing time is spent while using social media. “For broadcasters, the greatest opportunity is to reach social media users during that 70% of the time that they are not watching TV. “

The heart of Twitter and Facebook are their feeds — the place where friends, family and anybody else who is invited may post messages, links and, in the case of Facebook, display video, pictures and other graphics.

Stations and their anchors and reporters pounced on the opportunity to join these online communities and now, through trial and error, they are learning how to make the most of it.

Last fall, Raycom launched a “social media toolkit” to train stations how to improve the content and timing of Facebook and Twitter messages and to systematically include links to station websites. “From the last quarter of 2012 through the first quarter of 2013, we saw an 84% increase in referral traffic,” Sawyer says.

Raycom’s “toolkit” is a “proprietary software platform” that adapts the API (application programming interface) of several social media and content management tools. This lets Raycom stations instantly identify the most popular and engaging Web content, promote it via social media and syndicate it to other Raycom stations.

“My goal is to make social sharing a natural extension of the workflow,” Sawyer says. “After all, we are trying to generate page views by distributing news. Our toolkit facilitates this by structuring and timing our posts in the most effective way on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.”

“We encourage stations to include an official hashtag in every tweet,” says StepLeader’s Handley. Hashtags are shorthand labels that begin with a hash sign (#). Anyone can search for that keyword and find every message that includes that label. Merely clicking on the hashtag stores that search for future reference. “It’s a great way to get viewers to follow the stream of tweets by all the station personalities.”

But too many tweets can overwhelm or alienate users, according to Sawyer. “We discovered that the time periods immediately before each newscast are when are most likely to engage social media users to promote tune-in. That’s when a personal invitation from the anchors has the most impact.”

How you phrase that invitation also makes a difference, says Jill Manuel, news director at Hearst Television’s WEWS Cleveland. “We promote engagement by asking open-ended questions. We encourage our anchors to ‘pull back the veil’ a little bit and share behind-the-scenes details.”

“Facebook is a news destination here in Cleveland,” Manuel says. “Depending on the time of day, as many people see your content on Facebook as watch the newscast, but only if your viewers see your message. Stations soon learn it’s not enough to get viewers to ‘like’ the station Facebook page.”

Consumers often visit a branded page once to register, but rarely return. All subsequent messages are seen on the user’s scrolling NewsFeed. And what appears there is controlled by Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, which favors short messages and those with photos or links.

“We tailor the style of the Facebook post to the story,” says Mike Waterhouse, executive producer of NewsNet5.com at WEWS. “Initially, we thought people want the most talked-about story, but we get more interaction and engagement when we focus on breaking news, especially when we include a photo or video.”

MONETIZING STILL TRICKY

Even so, each station message is just one among many on those ever-changing NewsFeeds. “Every digital marketer sees reports that Facebook page updates are seen by only 10% to 40% of our followers,” says Lisa Jeffries, marketing manager for Capitol Broadcasting’s flagship WRAL Raleigh, N.C. “To increase visibility, we need to pay Facebook.”

Simply put, Facebook ads ensure that your message is displayed more often and reaches your target audience. Jeffries uses EdgeRank’s analytic data to reach specific viewers at specific times.“

Facebook advertising rates vary depending on the scope and especially the duration of the ad buy. News promotion on Facebook can be cost effective because most news stories last for less than a day.

Stations can buy much longer exposure for messages promoting such ongoing services as weather and traffic, or for generic image campaigns. Twitter similarly sells increased exposure, but the fleeting relevance of most news-related Tweets make repeated exposure less useful.

“We’ve tested ads on Facebook and found them to be more cost efficient than paying cash or trade for radio or outdoor ads,” says Raycom’s Sawyer.

So how effective are Facebook ads in boosting ratings? “It’s hard to know how much lift you get,” Jeffries admits. “Facebook only gives you reach, frequency and click-through rates” for messages that contain actual news stories or other media. “It’s especially hard to track a branding campaign which has nothing to click on.”

Social media remain stubbornly difficult to monetize directly. Both Facebook and Twitter prohibit overt third-party ads within posted messages, or pre-roll spots within video attachments. But stations are developing promising strategies for skirting these limitations.

KNBC, for instance, employs a clever strategy that leverages its huge Facebook fan base as a value added component of traditional advertising. It sell sponsorships to contests that require a Facebook entry page that is “skinned” with a graphic wrapper that features the local advertiser without violating Facebook policies. The actual ads appear on air and on the NBC-LA website. As a bonus, each contest attracts still more KNBC Facebook fans.

Despite its rapid growth, social media’s penetration is far from universal. “Our market is very tech savvy, but only 50% of our viewers are on social media,” Jeffries says.

So, the broadcast experts says, it is still important for on-air anchors and reporters to drive viewers to station websites where they are exposed to banner advertising and invited to subscribe to email services.

But social media, in proliferating forms like Vine and Intragram, will only get bigger. The education can never stop.

“We are constantly modifying and tweaking our best practices as the needs and expectations of our audience shift,” says KNBC’s Catania. “In the digital landscape, six months is like six years.”

This story originally appeared in TVNewsCheck’s Executive Outlook, a quarterly print publication devoted to the future of broadcasting. Subscribe here.