During the second virtual session of Evolution 2022, the digital media training program organized by Adepa with the support of the Meta Journalism Project and the ICFJ, Alba Mora Roca of AJ+ in Spanish shared her top tips for producing content for social media and digital media. These tips include distribution, engagement, and social media.
"What is the most relevant metric for native video on social media?" Roca asked the audience. The answer was almost unanimous: engagement. That is, interactions (likes, comments, and shares) divided by the reach of the piece. The Evolución 2022 speaker confirmed that this index is especially important in the attention economy we find ourselves in, where every medium and platform competes to attract users. This rate also allows for comparison with larger organizations, to understand how much one's audience is connecting with the content.
"The more engagement, the more visibility your content has. This, I believe, is a statement that can be made for all social networks," Roca concluded.
To generate quality and relevant digital content, it is essential to stay up to date with the latest trends or trends, that is, the social media conversations in which our audience or the audience we want to reach participates.
“It's very important to think about how your story connects to the social conversation already taking place on social media. Does your response advance it, counterargue it, add context or analysis? Does it help make the conversation more informed? Or is it a conversation that doesn't exist on social media, and as a medium, it's being put on the agenda?” the speaker explained.
Roca also highlighted the importance of creating a space for users to comment and interact with the content. AJ+ They often ask the audience what they thought of what was shared, if they think they forgot something, how they think the topic will evolve, and if they agree or disagree with it.
Trending topics are topics that become a trend: they occur when a lot of people are talking about the same thing, and they can last for an hour, two hours, a day, or an afternoon. An example would be the conversations that arose around Rihanna's pregnancy, following the announcement that the singer was expecting a mother.
Trendy topics, on the other hand, are trends that last much longer than a day, such as the "Body Positive" movement of valuing and normalizing bodies, the sustainability and ecology movement, or mental health.
"Our timelines either feeds They are bubbles and, to break them, there are artificial intelligence tools that allow you to hear what is being said outside of them,'' Roca explained.
NewsWhip Spike and Dataminr Whitepaper These are the programs used by AJ+ for this task, but the producer's recommendation was to implement them with caution, and to ask whether the trends or conversations that appear really have relevance in a regional context.
After monitoring, social listening should take place. According to Roca, this process occurs "in the mind of the viewer, not in any tool," and allows for the identification of topics. This listening is done through the platform's native search engines, and audience comments and concerns help identify peripheral topics that can be long- and medium-term stories.
“There isn't just one insight; there are many. But if you manage to take one that touches that nerve and develop it with grace and good taste, the story goes viral,” revealed the AJ+ producer. For Roca, there is the realm of objective information, and the realm of what people say about that information; where these two overlap lies the insight.
Although AJ+ isn't a monetized media outlet (it's funded by the Qatari government), Roca shared the keys to monetizing videos on Facebook. His first clarification was that videos must be at least one minute long to include ads, and that they should prioritize original, high-quality content.
Finally, the technique YouTubers and content creators in general use is to build anticipation about what will be revealed at the end of the video, to encourage viewers to stay tuned. To achieve this, it's important to keep the script lively, avoid slowdowns, and use the most engaging content at the beginning of the video to capture the viewer's attention.
The recommendation of Instagram Creators It is to use between 3 and 5 hashtags that are truly relevant per post, but identifying the right ones for each content is not a simple task.
Hashtags are a way to label and categorize content, but they also generate thematic communities within Instagram. In addition to following people or companies on the platform, users can follow hashtags to see posts that include them in their feed. For example, a dog lover could follow the more general hashtag "#Porro" or the more specific "#PorrosPequeños" to see photos of those pets in their feed.
The speaker clarified that one way to measure hashtags is by their frequency of use. Continuing with the example, #Perro has been used more than 9 million times on Instagram, while #PerrosPequeños has only 100,000 uses. Thus, the AJ+ producer categorizes hashtags into low frequency (less than 10,000 uses), medium frequency (between 10,000 and 100,000 uses), and high frequency (more than 100,000 uses).
Logic would seem to dictate that it would be better to use high-frequency hashtags, but the opposite is true. Roca explained that posts with these hashtags compete against huge amounts of content, making it very difficult to stand out.
Hashtags are a way to expand your reach by connecting with the audiences who follow you. The difficulty lies in the fact that Instagram selects between 10 and 12 hashtags. top posts per week per hashtag, and those are the ones most users see in their feed. Getting your content into that privileged dozen posts is, naturally, easier when there's less competition—that is, when the hashtags used are less frequent.
Thus, Roca recommends using low- and medium-frequency hashtags, which also have a major advantage: since they have lower circulation, they tend to have much more loyal communities.
The speaker also suggested avoiding hashtags like #Suicide, #Anorexia, #Depression, and #Ansiety, because although they are not prohibited, Instagram hides them. She also clarified that each social network has its own logic: on Twitter, for example, hashtags should be defined according to trending topics. On that platform, it is not necessary to place the number before the word, because if Twitter detects a tweet with a word that is trending, indexes it as such on its own.
UGC (User Generated Content) is unlicensed and therefore uncopyrightable. However, Roca recommended asking the author for written permission before posting their photos or videos, and always giving credit. This, in addition to being a matter of etiquette, also increases the chances of the content being replicated by its original author.
The producer suggested CCSearch, Internet Archive and Pixabay as sites where you can find public domain visual resources.
In the second session of the talk, Magalí Suárez, content director of the newspaper El Litoral de Santa Fe, shared the strategy that her newspaper began to develop in 2020 to attract younger audiences, focusing on audiovisual content.
“People were prejudiced against us because we were a 103-year-old newspaper,” Suárez said. “They thought everything we did was printed, and that we only published something digital from time to time. People under 35 visited our websites only to see when there were collective strikes, or to help an elderly relative.”
That's why he was born I MEAN, a team of under-25 professionals who began working on content aimed at their younger peers. The idea was to combine their command of a more modern and user-friendly language with the knowledge of the channel's cameramen to generate engaging audiovisual content.
In this way, they adapted El Litoral's productions and themes, telling stories that audiences could interact with. And in just two years of this new approach, they've seen great results. In April 2022, they had 140,000 total views on their YouTube channel, of which 95,000 came from subscribers, and 18,000 from search engines. And in that same month, their Instagram reels had 20,000 views each.
The Evolution 2022 talks will be held on the last Wednesday of each month, with the next one taking place on June 29 at 11:00 a.m., led by digital consultant Guilherme Ravache. Here is the link to register.
Report: Nina Michanie.
Alba Mora Roca works at the intersection of visual journalism and new narratives. Since 2016, she has been the Executive Producer of AJ+ Español, Al Jazeera's digital channel, a pioneer in social media video. In 2018, Alba led the innovation and multimedia panel for Verificado 2018, the multi-award-winning collaborative journalism initiative that united more than 90 organizations to combat fake news during the Mexican elections. Previously, Alba created and led the first digital video team for the newspaper El País América. She also worked at The Associated Press as an Interactive Producer.
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