Engaging with Your Readers
Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 6:39 PM
Which reader engagement tools and activities are most valuable to
editors?
By William Dunkerley
Making your
articles enticing to read goes a long way toward reader engagement. Good
writing and editing are requirements for achieving that.
There's
another element that now bears a fresh look: the matter of getting
reliable feedback from readers on what you are publishing. The
acceleration of social change in how we all acquire and digest content
is one aspect. Further change that is a consequence of Covid is another.
The
massive 2010 editorial failure at Newsweek is now a classic
example of how badly things can go when editors fail to get and act on
audience feedback. The magazine's demise followed an in-house attempt to
reinvent itself editorially. The fatal flaw was that editors implemented
changes to suit their own tastes and not those its target audience might
have preferred. After that plan failed, the magazine ultimately was sold
to a buyer for one dollar.
Successful editors have used several
tools to garner feedback from readers including online reader comments,
letters to the editor columns, attending or sponsoring group gatherings
that attract members of their target reading audience, readership
surveys, and focus groups.
Online Reader Comments
The
advent of online publishing opened vast new opportunities for readers to
express themselves on each article published. That sounds like a great
way for an editor to monitor reader reaction, but it came with some big
problems. Instead of offering substantive feedback, many posters use a
comments section as a soapbox for pet issues. Often they debate their
issues among themselves, even heatedly; some posters use the opportunity
to promote shady business pitches or political material; coarse and
inappropriate language can appear; rights of others can be infringed
upon; and legal liability considerations can arise. Overall an image
unbefitting your publication can be associated with the comments section.
One
response by editors has been to institute active moderation of submitted
posts. But that can be time-consuming and expensive. Another response is
to simply eliminate reader comments altogether. There has been a growing
trend toward that solution. But that shuts down a major means of reader
engagement.
Letters to the Editor
Publishing a
regular column with letters to the editor is a long-established feature
dating far back into the print era. My first editorial job was as
letters editor for a national special interest consumer publication.
Each month I would accumulate a large pile of submissions. I had two
print pages to fill. It was a popular feature. The letters I selected
dealt both with comments about the publication (good and bad) and other
comments of general interest to the audience the magazine served.
Through reading all the submissions I acquired a good sense of how
readers were reacting and what interested them. That information was of
little interest to my chief editor, however. Basically, the letters
editor was expected to simply fill the allotted two pages with
interesting letters. Analyzing the overall nature of the comments and
observing trends over time was overlooked by editorial management.
How
are letters to the editor handled at your publication? Perhaps they too
are considered simply as editorial input for the column, without serving
as a useful source in editorial management decisions. If so, you might
want to look at the bulk of letters received as a form of valuable
reader feedback.
Trade Shows
Trade shows are a
natural venue for B2B editors to mingle with the people in their
respective industries. Many publications participate as exhibitors,
presenting the benefits of reading their publications. Often editors can
also participate as expert speakers at these gatherings. A similar
situation exists for editors of special interest consumer publications.
There
are also opportunities for editors of other consumer publications. They
can take part in conferences, seminars, and workshops that are attended
by their target audiences. There are also trade shows in which your
advertisers participate. They may not be attended largely by your own
target audience, but instead by advertisers and their spectrum of
customers.
Take a look at the categories of advertisers that
appear in your publication. Often they are concentrated in several
particular areas. Participating in related trade shows can give editors
insights into participant business interests. Acquiring and retaining
audiences that will be responsive to your advertisers is important to
your publication's financial success. These trade shows can help you to
focus your content accordingly.
Surveys and Focus Groups
The
aforementioned reader engagement activities focus on giving editors a
general sense of reader wants and needs. Focus groups represent a
research methodology that can enhance that sense, as you can more
directly explore and test reader reactions. But all these approaches
will give you qualitative, not quantitative, input. That's where more
formal surveys come in. They generally elicit responses from a randomly
selected sample of your target audience. From that you can reasonably
project the results upon the total universe comprised by that audience.
Many
publications regularly survey their audiences. However, surveys are
typically geared toward collecting information for the ad sales
department’s use. But those advertising-oriented surveys offer a good
opportunity to tag along with questions that could provide valuable
input to editors.
There is typically another aspect of surveys
that should be addressed. These surveys often target existing readers.
If you are interested in audience development, it will be helpful to
learn the needs and interests of potential readers. They may differ from
those of your existing readers. That means surveying potential readers
will be an important objective too.
In the above instances, the
impact of the Covid pandemic should be taken into account. Many annual
gatherings have been postponed, cancelled, or permanently shuttered.
Participants may be reluctant to take part in focus groups that require
their physical attendance. One happy consequence of the pandemic is that
it forced many people to become adept at meeting online. People's
facility in using Zoom, for example, has, well, zoomed. View these all
as opportunities for opening new ways of getting close to your audience
and facilitating engagement.
William Dunkerley is principal of
William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.
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