Can traditional media survive without social media?

https://www.petevanbaalen.com/single-post/2018/10/25/Can-traditional-media-survive-without-social-media

The headline, like it was designed to do, caught my attention. "Can your publication survive without Facebook?"

So this is what we've come down to, can a local newspaper, radio or TV station even survive without the audience generated by the social media giant? Maybe I'm in a fantasy world, but to me there is no doubt the answer is yes. Hell yes, maybe even.

The article chronicles a Danish publisher, TV Midtvest who went dark on Facebook for two weeks to see what the impact was to their website for their eight regional TV stations in Denmark. Their head of digital, Nadia Nikolajeva spoke about their experiment at the INMA Media Innovation Week in Amsterdam in late September.

They went cold turkey, no Facebook posts for 14 days, having only a post that invited people to go to their website instead. What happened is a little alarming. Site visitors dropped 27% during the two weeks, and that's a lot. But page views only dropped 10%. People still found their way to the website, without the prompting from Facebook.

Facebook for most websites provides a lot of "one and done" traffic, meaning they come for the story that showed up on their feed and never click on another story while visiting your site. Every page view is important, but to me this shows one of the problems with social media. Is social media traffic coming to your website really meaningful traffic? I haven't seen, but wonder if there is research that shows how often visitors to a website click on local banner ads compared with visitors who came to the site by other means? The bounce rate is so high for social media generated traffic, I would bet very few interact with anything else on the site, let alone banner advertising which pays the bills.

I look at results from my own site, and I believe you can survive without Facebook. Given all the recent news about the US Supreme Court Justice hearings in Washington, DC, one of our state's US Senator's announced he would not vote for confirmation. This story broke on a Friday midday, and we immediately put a story up online about this decision. We also posted about it on Facebook, and the reaction exploded.

The Facebook post about the story blew up. We had a lot of reactions, comments and shares of this story which produce a very high reach on the platform. This post was one of our better performing posts on the site in some time. Hundreds of comments on Facebook, yet barely a whisper in terms of traffic on my site. People react on Facebook, but they did not read the details on the story online. We did a great job of creating content and page views for Facebook, but what did we do for our own site? Very little, it turned out.

The same was true with a several Facebook Live projects we've tried. Our most successful Facebook Live broadcast was with a local singer that made it to the finals of NBC's The Voice. Our views on Facebook were very strong. Doing Facebook Live, you could make the case, helped make our brand stronger and more top of mind. But there was immediate impact on our revenue or bottom line. We were generating page views and revenue for Facebook.

Publishers  need to stay focused on driving traffic to their site. It is going to be difficult enough making enough money on digital based products with dwindling cpm charges, let alone if publishers end up generating traffic for social media instead of themselves. Using Facebook and other social media outlets as a source for traffic instead of being the source for them may end up one of the industry's biggest challenges in the near future.

My example of the story on the Supreme Court shows that the habits of readers has changed. The headline sufficed, and they did not bother to actually read the content. What started at USA Today by giving us snippets of content has been reduced to simple headlines as all consumers want. That is scary for the news business, and for the republic in which we live.

So the answer is to innovate; something most media outlets talk about more than doing. In the case of TV Midtvest, they did take action. As the article wrote, "TV Midtvest realised they can innovate and develop in-house tools that will allow journalists to communicate with their audience while retaining control over users data. They even took a step further and developed new services like a streaming app, that saw 20,000 downloads since its launch in spring."

Developing an app might not be within the grasp of all online publishers.  But there are things that can be done to help drive traffic. To me, one of the most obvious is to use Facebook to promote your brand, and ways for consumers to interact.

If you do not have a email database, then start one. Use Facebook to promote its existence and help convert those Facebook likes into deliverable email addressed. Then you can sell your email newsletters to advertisers, making money from the email. Those emails sent daily, weekly or whatever works best for your news cycle, will help drive traffic back to your website. And not to Facebook.

I'm not anti-Facebook or anti-social media. There's a decent chance you made it to this post from a social media post. But I'm using social media to promote my website, not as a substitute for my website. I think a lot of websites, particularly those from media outlets, have forgotten that point. We need to use Facebook to promote our site, but figure out ways to drive web traffic to our sites and not Facebook.

Newspaper advertising remains relevant but most adapt for advertiser's needs

https://www.petevanbaalen.com/single-post/2018/10/02/Newspaper-advertising-remains-relevant-but-most-adapt-for-advertisers-needs

Going to a really good conference for me is like getting an infusion of energy. Whenever I get a chance to attend a industry conference, my goal is to walk away from the meeting with at least one idea or kernel of knowledge that will pay for the time away from the office.

The annual conference for the Hoosier State Press Association provided me several good ideas and some great knowledge that will more than pay for the trip. Hopefully you were there and experienced the same results as me. For those that weren't able to make it, here are a couple of my take-aways that might help you too as you strive to end the year on a positive note.

Ryan Dohrn from Brainswell Media was one of the main speakers, working with advertising managers and sales reps. One of his quotes from the conference has been repeated numerous times by me since returning to the office. "If we sell traditional media in traditional ways, we will get traditional results." How you change things up depends on your market and your resources, but the reality is we have to change how we are doing business. Media outlets cannot do the same promotions this coming year that they were doing 5 years ago. Just as the businesses in small town - Main Street America have to change, media must also adapt and change.

Newspapers still remain a great option for creating brand awareness for advertisers. A business builder or frequency program where an advertiser runs a series of smaller ads on a consistent basis provides you with a much needed base of ads in the newspaper,  and provides your advertiser with better awareness with consumers in the marketplace. Advertisers can growth their brand and their business by associating with the local newspaper. Growing a business's reputation by affiliating with the trusted source for local information, which in many cases is one of the oldest  businesses in town, is very real and we as publishers often forget that value.

Building top of mind awareness through the newspaper is not new, but I believe it is something that many have lost track of as a valuable marketing asset to our customers. Consumers need to see a message 10 times before they act. Through newspaper frequency programs, the advertiser is building that awareness and developing an intent to buy from its customers. That awareness drives people to their store and to make purchases. It also helps with online search engines  like Google. When you are searching online, you are typically not searching generic phrases. Consumers are searching what is familiar with them, so a stronger brand equals a stronger presence online. Traditional media can help digital media's performance.

Newspaper advertising still performs. Hopefully that is a statement that you know and absolutely believe, and didn't need to go to a conference to have that reaffirmed. Sabline Carbaugh is the owner and COO for Golden Web Marketing, and her article titled "5 Reasons Print Advertising Works" offers some quick hit nuggets for your next sales meeting. My personal favorite is a Penn State University study that showed that readers retain newspaper advertising better than other marketing options. This is a point that gets illustrated every year for me, the Monday after the Super Bowl. Companies spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads. Yet hours afterwards, only one or two of those messages are remembered and associated with the brand they are promoting.

There is plenty of negative in the world. It is important that the newspaper industry continues to find and promote the good things that are still being said about it. For me, the words of Dohrn and those that came and shared their ideas at the annual HSPA conference provided me with fuel to attack fourth quarter.