Are you looking for new ways to engage your readers? We guide you through 3 ways to increase audience engagement.
Why engagement matters
There’s no shortage of content available online, and studies have found that first impressions are often the only opportunity you get online. Social referrals are now considered to be the single biggest source of traffic for most online publishers. Social media drives a staggering 31% of all this referral traffic. But social referrals spend less time on a publisher’s’ site and view less pages. They bounce. Publishers need to think long and hard about what they can do to keep an increasingly social audience engaged. Clearly, the content on offer right now seems to be lacking. People coming from social would most likely expect a more social experience when they land on a page. With the content on offer today, there is often no social experience provided. Those referrals are therefore more likely to abandon the content site in favor of a social network site.
We’ve compiled 3 ways for you to increase audience engagement:
- Provide a “Warm Landing”
- Use Visuals
- Keep Content Fresh
1. Provide a ‘Warm Landing’
Make sure your readers are prepared for a warm landing on your property by incorporating social into the destination page. Social content alongside editorial content provides more opportunities for engagement, and minimizes click outs. For example, recent Crowdynews research shows that out of 550 people surveyed, 40% indicates that having a social media stream with content from multiple sources increases the reader friendliness of a website.
2. Use Visuals
If you’re struggling to engage your website visitors, including more or higher-quality visuals could be the key to increase engagement. 40% of users online will provide more favorable responses to visual content than text-only content. Strive to provide a website experience that’s eye-catching, even if your visitors’ attention is divided between their laptop, mobile and tablet.
3. Keep Content Fresh
When people visit your site, if you’re lucky, they’ll land on the homepage first. Give your audience new and immediate ways to interact by keeping the content of your homepage and other pages where your audience is most likely to land fresh. By refreshing relevant social content as it’s posted (in real-time), you offer new ways to interact from the moment the readers land on your website.
Go Social
At Crowdynews we help publishers use social media curation to help achieve these engagement goals. We strongly believe that in order to engage a social audience and keep it hooked, it’s crucial to blend your editorial content with high quality social content. The result is a more social-oriented website, where today’s audiences feel more at home and spend more time.
Contact us today to start leveraging the power of social media for your publication and increase your audience engagement!