Distributing and Promoting Your Social Solutions Journalism
Like any good story, it does not end when you've hit "publish." After producing your social-first solutions story, you want to carefully consider distributing and promoting your content. If you have not done so already, choose which social media platform(s) to share your story.
It's not advisable to depend solely on a single social media platform for our work. To reach a broader audience and engage with them effectively, we should distribute our content across multiple platforms depending on the specific audiences we have.
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- Lauri García,
Salvadorian freelance solutions journalist
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Consider the format of your work and the audience you want to reach. A strong alignment between your social media distribution strategy and content increases the chances of engagement and success, because social media algorithms reward content that resonates with its users, and factors in metrics such as time spent on page, likes, comments, and shares.
You can choose and share the same story on multiple social media platforms but try to customize the caption, length, or format it as much as possible.
A cohesive distribution strategy might look like this:
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Choose your platform/s: Who is the target audience of the story? In what format? Checkout our breakdown of platforms here.
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Craft your caption and hashtags: How are you choosing to introduce your work? Make sure you have a good hook and speak with urgency. Also, include the right hashtags so that your work appears in the trending topics on the platforms.
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Share your content: When you publish the story, keep in mind the best times to post on each social media. This guide from Hubspot, a provider of social media marketing tools.
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Engage with your audience: Interact with comments on the post to build buzz and timeliness around your content. This helps boost views and circulation. Don't be afraid to send friends and family a direct link to the post to increase your reach. Also, consider tagging relevant people to bring them into the conversation.
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Analyze and optimize: After a few days, look at the post's analytics and engagement rates. Were there any trends worth noting? As you continue to use social media for solutions journalism, consider your performance metrics to see what type of content worked better than others and build on this for your future strategy.
Organic Content
As we’ve discussed in this guide, social media is a powerful way to tell, distribute and drive a solutions story forward. There are typically two main ways to circulate your content on social media: organically (free) and paid (advertising). We briefly dive into each type of distribution and its key considerations:
Pros
Sharing your content organically is a good way for your social media audience to discover your solutions story on their feed naturally. That can help prove authenticity and gain trust as a journalist because your content showed up on their timelines based on their interests or platform recommendation.
Cons
Often, your post can only reach as far as the number of followers your dedicated social media account might have, which can limit the impressions you can get.
Tips
To enhance your organic reach, encourage your audience to leave comments and engage with them, while also focusing on crafting compelling calls-to-action (CTA) that encourage shares. By doing so, you increase the likelihood that the platform's algorithm will recognize your content as noteworthy and display it to users with similar interests.
Paid Content
Pros
Boosting your content with ads allows your social media solutions journalism story to reach a hyper-relevant targeted audience that otherwise might not have been exposed to your account or content.
Cons
Requires a financial investment for the ads (but can be minimal; most platforms don't have a minimum spend requirement).
Tips
Select the type of social media ad format with intent. A best practice is to sponsor the content so it looks native to your audience's feed. Check out this Social Media Advertising guide from Hootsuite that might be helpful in planning your first campaign.
Engage With the Audience
While distribution is important, it often can be a passive way of connecting with the audience because it seldom allows you to gather information or forge deeper connections with them. On top of that, social media’s dynamic algorithms play a significant role in determining which news articles are shown to users.
Those algorithms take into account a variety of factors, including a user's interests, engagement history, and the popularity of the content. This means that news outlets need to be savvy about how they optimize their content for social media in order to maximize their reach and engagement.
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Highlight the impact of solutions
Use data, quotes, and other metrics to show the changes these solutions are creating. For example, if you are covering a story about a nonprofit organization that is helping to reduce food waste, highlight the number of meals they have saved from being thrown away and how that has positively impacted the environment and helped people in need.
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Encourage collaboration and community-building
Journalists can use social media to encourage collaboration and community-building among your audience. Ask for feedback and ideas, create spaces for discussions, and highlight collaborations happening in your community. For example, on Twitter and Instagram, journalists can set up polls to get ideas from their audiences on what to cover next, encouraging buy-in to the editorial decisions of the newsroom. Or, a journalist can host a Facebook Live event about a topic from their beat to learn about audience needs. This can help build a sense of community and encourage co-creation.
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Use social media analytics
Try to understand what content is resonating with your audience and what's not. Use this information to adjust your strategy and replicate more engaging content. Use social media analytics tools such as Social Flow and Google Analytics to track your engagement and reach. Analyze which posts have received the most likes, shares, and comments, and use this information to tailor your content and increase engagement. For instance, if a post about a specific solution received a lot of attention, consider covering similar solutions in the future.
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Provide actionable tips and resources
Use data, quotes, and other metrics to show the changes these solutions are creating. For example, if you are covering a story about a nonprofit organization that is helping to reduce food waste, highlight the number of meals they have saved from being thrown away and how that has positively impacted the environment and helped people in need.
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Use social media “stories” feature
You can use the stories feature on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to provide behind-the-scenes glimpses of your reporting process, share quick tips and facts related to the solutions you are covering, and interact with your audience in a more casual and personal way.