Engaging your audience
If your goal in journalism is just to get as many eyes as possible on your story, you’re doing it wrong.
The goal of journalism is to focus on the purpose we aim to serve. I know you’re asking, well what is that purpose? The purpose is to be of the best possible service to the community; connecting audiences to both ideas and to each other.
Ask yourself, what kind of a relationship do you want with the audience that you are serving? How can you make that happen?
Do you just want eyes on your story for monetary purposes or do you want your story to have a meaningful impact to your community?
According to Joy Mayer, expert in all things relating to audience engagement, there are several ways that you can make collaboration happen.
First of all, you have to be willing to accept collaboration from your audience. If your goal is to have your pieces be talked about more, you need to be willing to hear what the audience says and pay attention to why they say it.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from Joy is that the key to engaging your audience is that you need to go where they already are.
As a journalist, you are already searching for stories. Sometimes in order to find the connection and collaboration you’re looking for means going past the surface of the “obvious news.” Obvious news is information that is easily accessible or national news that we’ve all heard about. If it is “obvious news” that your audience is interested in, what’s a different angle on the story? How can you turn to your community to get answers about what they care about? As journalists, we need to dig deeper. We can find news (that we may not have even known is news) in interesting places. And the question to constantly keep in the back of your mind is how can I get my audience to help me develop this story or idea?
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See who is already sharing your content and read what they’re writing about it when they share it. Join a local Facebook group about something that interests you. Listen in on what’s being talked about around you. Most importantly, where are you already part of a community? Tap into these networks that already exist.
Once you find the topic you want to learn more about, the major question in getting your audience involved is where online and offline are people already talking about this? When you begin to involve your audience, there’s a process you can follow: listen, validate, seek and invite feedback, ingest and respond.
Listening doesn’t just mean hearing. Actively listening means ingesting what the audience is saying about this topic and what their reactions are. Joy suggests you host conversations just to listen. So simple, yet so effective. Ask a question on the reader’s board you’re following or the Facebook page you’ve joined. See what people respond.
Validate their responses. The key is not to disappear after you’ve started the conversation. Stay involved. Respond to comments, ask more questions about why the audience feels a particular way and mediate the conversation to keep it flowing.
If you’re writing about a controversial or heated topic, it’s important to create a safe space for everyone. If that means deleting hate speech that may appear, so be it. Or it can mean private messaging certain people to talk more about the topic. The best way to get the information and collaboration you want is to make people feel like they can talk about how they really feel candidly, openly and honestly.
If you have a goal of having a more social relationship with your audience, you must be actively seeking feedback when you create conversations. In order to move forward, you have to gather some data on what was actually helpful about what they said.
Now that we’ve talked about how you can get your audience to be more collaborative and/or more social, let’s discuss why this is so important.
Sometimes, journalists put out stories without really caring about who reads it or what the audience gets out of it. The process of journalism should be that the audience is welcome to add to the conversation about a topic or idea prior to the story even being written. The community should be playing an agenda-setting role for your story. And after the story is written and published, the journalist needs to go back to the community and stay involved. The goal should be to create a cycle of community involvement both pre- and post-publication.
Members of the community that you are in are valuable resources and many have an untapped potential. Think of it this way as well: everyone is an expert on their own experiences. By looking for ways to solicit and value contribution, you may find that you have a depth of expertise and knowledge added to your story that wasn’t there before.
