MARKETING AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
A paper is worthless without its readers, so marketing is a huge priority. We always want to expand and diversify our audience as we bring in as many readers as we can. The most important thing to do for this, is study our analytics and learn from them.
SITE ANALYTICS
Every day that I walk into class, one of the first things that I do is check our SNO analytics. First I check the page views. Our highest so far has been 25,000, and I would love for us to get even higher. Then, I check the bounce rate (which measures what percent of people only view one page on our site). We always want our bounce rate to be below 70%. This year was the first in our site's history that we've had over 18,000 page views in one time period, and a bounce rate lower than 70%.
Here's our analytics comparing last year to this year. This year's page views are consistently higher than last year's.
We published a controversial news story that was popular in our school. The Instagram post had over 1,000 comments as students argued over the topic. It remains our most popular story to date.
Our analytics have been lower since Thanksgiving and winter break, but we were able to bring them back up.
Here's our analytics page from just this fall. Our lows on weekends have been around 300 page views a day and our highs during the week have been averaging 900 to 1,100 with a highest of 1,500.
Here's our best analytics from this year. Our bounce rate was the lowest it had ever been at 66% (which we celebrated), and our page views were some of the highest yet with 23,000.
We've also learned a lot by looking at our Google Site Analytics. We've been discrediting Facebook's impact on our reach, but these analytics show that we get a good amount of clicks from Facebook, more than Instagram or Twitter. Looking at this, we've also been getting views from the News Break app, which is an app that shows local news. So, we've begun adding a "Prosper" and "Prosper High School" tag to our stories, so that they'll pop up on the News Break app.
For example, here's a recent news brief I wrote, where I included these tags so we could reach the News Break app, and it could be more likely to pop up on Google searches for our town or school.
SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS
Social media is something I knew little about. I didn't get a personal social media account until I turned 16 in the spring of my sophomore year, where even then I only got Instagram. Because of this, I knew little about social media when I got into more leadership roles. As I've logged into the social media accounts and begun to look at them more, I've learned a lot about how to work it and analyze our insights.
Being social media manager is an incredibly hard job. Posting every time a story publishes is understandably difficult for our manager, so the Editorial Board (including me) pitches in to help post on our socials when needed.
Just like our page views, we are always aware of our social media insights. We're always looking at what posts get the most reach and why, and how we can continue that. It shows us which articles and topics are most popular and what we should do more of.
Check out this interactive image (left) to see my analysis on why our top posts from the last two years were so popular (to view in full screen, click the arrows on the bottom right of the image). Below, you can see which posts from this year were popular (showing how many of the popular posts from the past two years were actually from this year).
BEST WAYS TO GET MORE INSTAGRAM VIEWS:
Let's start with the obvious: controversial or football content always garners views. Of course, we don't depend on these or publish stories for this reason. Having an excess of these stories would be overkill as well as uneven coverage and bias.
Besides this, the main way we get our views is through tagging. When we tag people in our articles, they're more aware of the post and more likely to share it on their story for their friends to see and click on.
We also keep in mind what accounts commonly repost our posts. For example, the boy's soccer team account is always sure to repost our posts and even post about the slideshows on their own, so we're always sure to post quickly and tag them whenever we publish a soccer slideshow.
Another big technique is having a person in the featured image of the article and post. This is extremely helpful for posts about events such as pep rallies are sports games. The singular person in the photo is likely to repost it on their story, even if the article isn't directly about them like a feature story.
Outside of Instagram, I'm much less educated on other social media platforms. However, I still help post and analyze insights on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Our Twitter is useful because we can post the actual link to the story in the Tweet, while Instagram has no way to put a link in a post.
We have a pretty good Twitter following, but it's generally based on sports. Our sports tweets get the most impressions by far. The problem is, students use Twitter much differently than they use Instagram, and many are much less active on Twitter or don't even have an account at all. However, athletes use Twitter fairly often, which is why our sports posts are so popular.
Facebook is also useful because we can post the link to the story we're posting. Our Facebook audience is admittedly small, however, it is definitely growing. Before this year, we had less than 100 page likes, and now we have over 120, and we're continuing to grow. Facebook is a great way for us to reach staff and parents.
MAKING OUR SITE RUN FASTER
Something we've done to help our readers was make our site run faster. One of our staff members is proficient in computer science and coding, so he worked to analyze our site run times and find ways to make it run faster via coding and other techniques. As he did this, I helped analyze and approve all decisions he made. With his advice, I implemented a new staff rule of no PNG files on our site as they greatly slowed our site down. We got our site run times to drop from over 10 seconds to just three seconds. Right after we did this, our bounce rate decreased, and this could have helped cause that.
DONATIONS, SPONSORS, AD SALES
In past years, our staff has attempted to do ad sales, but it just didn't work out. None of the staff members were interested in it, and with COVID-19 hitting local businesses hard, it wasn't something we were able to do. What we're thinking about right now, is sponsorships, and we even have a few staff members that know people interested in buying one.
However, we have recently started is accepting donations through SNO. We haven't gotten a substantial amount of money from it, but we've still gotten some.
The biggest challenge for our staff is time. With about only 20 staff members that publish regularly and are in the class, we already have our hands full with publishing daily. It's really hard to be able to commit to starting something like ad sales and sponsors when publishing quality content is always our number one priority.
STUDENT EXPO
To recruit new members, I helped work our staff's table on the student expo night for the middle school students. We had a large amount of interested students and parents, and it was a great way for us to get our name out there for incoming freshman whether they join the class or read our paper.
