Spill The Trend

Four things journalists need to know about engagement

An artistic figure.

Dec. 1, 2022

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Hey gossip readers, today’s tea is on audience engagement. By the end of this blog post, you will understand how to connect with an individual, communities and your audience. First, what is audience engagement? It’s a journalistic term that doesn’t have one meaning in specific. For some, it means promotion and marketing. For others, it’s about crowdsourcing. Although those are some factors in engagement, I’m here to reveal that engagement is making sure your work matters to your audience.

Analytics are important, but they’re not the whole picture

According to Nicole Blanchett, audience engagement can only come from content that matters to the community.

As you can deduce from the audio clip, analytics are important, but they’re only part of the picture. The audio clip mentions that it’s all about the short and long views. Ms. Blanchett explained quality content is important, and here’s why. Let’s say you’re surfing the web and you come across an interesting title, so you open the link. Once you open the article, you notice it was clickbait, so you don’t return to that writer’s work. Meanwhile, if you actively follow someone’s writings because they are pretty interesting, that induces audience engagement as you return to that writer’s work.

To add to Nicole’s statement, there are various engagement methods, such as social media. Nicole encourages social media to connect with the community and ensure the audience is consuming the shared stories and content, not only as a source of promotion. Additionally, it helps to communicate with the loyal audience as they engage in conversations to continue producing stories axed for them.

Social media is not just for promotion

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

As gossip lovers, this following social media tutorial should be easy! Let’s start by analyzing this retweet by Toronto Star writer Saba Eitzaz about @Starthismatters’ post about refugees losing their status in Canada. She writes about an event covering this critical issue. What is the first step to audience engagement? The key is to write a story in which your audience can connect with its valuable content. The tweet mentions, “a growing number of refugees are losing their status,” meaning that many people can relate to the content. On top of this, Eitzaz is a great writer; she lets the reader imagine as if they were in that person’s place, “what if you risked your life to see your dying father…” To resume, Eitzaz keeps the readers’ interest and doesn’t promote Toronto Star as such but uses social media to help underrepresented people in the status issue.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Furthermore, Toronto Star posted an opinion piece to answer the audience’s questions about the World Cup, a favourite topic this month. Social media is hence a way for Toronto Star to connect with the audience and their sporty needs. One thing they can improve is to relate more to the audience, as it feels like a more formal tweet while being an opinion tweet. But, in brief, their tweet is still effective and allows a connected audience through the sporty content rather than simply being a promotional post.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Now, you all are almost experts in using social media for audience engagement. To ensure you know your socials, let’s analyze this last tweet. Toronto Star selflessly tweeted about the Toronto Humane Society giving a voice to the animals and the charity after people had stolen things. This proves they use their social media platform to help rather than promote their news channel. Equally important, the writer provides a sense of urgency for help, making this story more meaningful and exciting in the eyes of the public. Finally, Toronto Star properly uses its voice to help others at various times of the day for people with different interests. In these past three tweets, we saw a tweet on refugees, the World Cup, and the Toronto Humane Society. Hopefully, this helped you gossip lovers know how to use social media for audience engagement better!

Building engagement can build trust

In our JRN 104 class, we constantly hear about the REACH IT acronym, but what does it mean exactly? First, as people who love gossip, we must remember to respect people who share stories to build trust.  If we create a respectful environment, we encourage others to engage respectfully. To add, gathering evidence in stories is crucial to trust because the last thing we want is to spread false information! If we do, however, accidentally send out misinformation, please take accountability, have humility and provide updates.

According to REACH IT, building a connection with your audience is also essential. Keep in contact with the people after you publish or broadcast. To be trustworthy, you would keep in touch with your sources and audience after posting so they don’t think you used them for information or a good story. Always be inclusive to reflect the diversity of your audience; otherwise, you may seem prejudiced. Finally, always be transparent. For more ways to follow the acronym, check out this Padlet of what the REACH IT acronym means to other journalism students! With all these steps, you will be the perfect candidate for writing stories with an engaged audience!

Engagement is an ongoing experiment

Do you guys love to try new things? How about trying new ways to engage with your audience? In the analytics section, I discussed what audience engagement is and what difference it makes with the help of this website. From there, we can learn numerous definitions, methods and ways to listen to your audience. Here is a video explaining the future of engagement thanks to social media. In this video, she goes into further detail on metrics, different social media platforms and how to use them to your advantage while connecting to your audience. For example, Instagram stories with polls and interaction methods are always a good idea to receive genuine feedback to continue producing news tailored to your target audience. By all means, engagement is always an ongoing experiment as technology keeps developing; we’re all on Tik Tok and Instagram, while the older generation depends on Facebook, already proving society’s advancements.

Have your say

By now, I’m sure you all have a greater understanding of audience engagement and will yourselves start using these newfound skills! If you have any questions or thoughts, please share them in a Google Form below! Now go out and engage gossip readers!

Leave a comment