MTV News NewsWhip Analytics Testimonial
MTV News occupies a unique space in the publishing world - as a TV network, brand, and legacy publisher, they have diverse fans across a wide range of age groups.
As such, their audience development team works to appeal to their existing audience and grow into expanded verticals. Audience Development Manager Andrew Fletcher says social engagement data is key in building that strategy, helping MTV get actionable insight into what their targets are interacting with every day.
“Social research has been critical to our business - When we took over managing the MTV News Facebook page, it had millions of existing followers that were used to celebrity-focused content. After new hires were made and our editorial strategy changed, we’ve started to build out a loyal audience of fans who look for feature stories as well as daily news from a more leshed-out point of view.”
- Andrew Fletcher, Audience Development Manager, MTV
MTV News brought on NewsWhip Analytics to better understand their audience, and see why their competitors have been successful with similar fans. By tracking site domains against every major social network over the past three years, Analytics gives MTV expansive data on what’s proven to work in the music vertical.
It also gives MTV News a central view of their performance across all of social, so they can drill down and replicate their biggest successes.
“We have a list of 15 or so similar publishers that we access regularly in NewsWhip Analytics. We normally look at this on a weekly and monthly basis to see which way sites are trending. We love the engagements per article number and often use that to benchmark performance.” NewsWhip Analytics Request Demo
NewsWhip Analytics not only provides MTV with a view of how their competitors are performing over time, it shows exactly which stories and social posts are responsible for the dips and spikes in engagement.
By highlighting this notable spike in engagement from the past three months, MTV can see which of their stories performed unusually well, and analyze why those formats worked. We can see that MTV’s top two performing articles for the selected time period drove over 120,000 engagements each by leveraging nostalgic topics. NewsWhip Analytics Request Demo
MTV can also look to the social network engagements graphs to see how much engagement they’re typically getting per article across all of social, and how their social engagement is trending week to week and month to month. Although Rolling Stone garners the most total interactions for the selected period, MTV drives nearly 1,000 more average interactions per story. NewsWhip Analytics Request Demo
Analytics allows MTV to create saved, constantly updating dashboards for their top goals - whether it’s to keep a pulse on competitors or to cover a speciic album release.
“We’re in the process of doing some full-year 2016 competitive reporting that is heavily reliant on NewsWhip’s data, so we’ve built two dashboards featuring a competitive set of around 15 publishers - both domains and Facebook pages.”
“It’s important for us to see everyone’s top articles by engagements, top Facebook posts by engagements, and average engagements per article. This not only helps from a benchmarking standpoint, but also from a content strategy standpoint.” NewsWhip Analytics Request Demo
The Facebook engagements view in Analytics lets MTV drill down into post type, to see how others are distributing content to the platform. It’s clear that Billboard is driving a lot of engagement around their increased production of photos and videos for social.
With a central view of every domain and social network they want to track, MTV has easy access to the social data they need to execute a successful strategy. And Analytics’ export options allow MTV’s audience development team to show key stakeholders hard data to direct future coverage or back editorial decisions.
“We can’t monitor everyone’s pages and sites all the time, so checking in every now and then all at once can help drive our strategy to suit our unique audience. On a weekly basis, we go in and grab the top 10 competitive articles sorted by engagements and present them to our team of editors to keep them updated around what’s been working for other publications.” NewsWhip Analytics Request Demo
To access data around macro trends, MTV can keyword search events like the Grammys [pictured above] or the VMAs, to see the most successful publishers and domains for related content.
With NewsWhip Analytics, Andrew and his team have saved hours of research and analysis time. They’re now using Analytics to get the expansive audience insights they need to create a successful strategy, for any topic.
“Since using NewsWhip Analytics, we’ve been able to compare our coverage of stories to how other sites covered the same story. [It’s] helped form content strategy for specials like the VMAs and Election Night coverage, and we’ve used charts from NewsWhip in reports. It’s great to see how other sites are trending over time to conirm our hypotheses.”
“In other tools we’ve tried from a domain standpoint, nothing else compares.”
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