As a leading local news publisher in Canada, Narcity Media and specifically our Narcity Canada social feeds are tasked with connecting our Millennial and Gen Z audiences to the daily content and information pertaining to local and national news, things to do in their city, lifestyle, internet culture and trending content. Our social channels not only do the heavy lifting of promoting our website content and driving over 75% of our referral traffic to Narcity.com, but we also provide a platform for our Video content (in-house created, sourced UGC and paid creator partnerships), affiliate marketing and branded/sponsored content that we create entirely in-house from our Studio team.
It is the job of the Social media team to seamlessly integrate all of these content aspects while still optimizing for engagement and social audience growth. As we continuously grow our audience and get more eyes for our web content team and branded content partners, we have the key objective to provide a balanced output of all our forms of content. Using the news to drive information, referral traffic and engagement. Using video via reels and Facebook Watch to create viral and shareable content to reach new prospective followers. All this leads to leveraging our affiliate content and branded/sponsored content as revenue drivers for the company and to continue to support our growth.
Being able to execute and curate all the content we create (50+ stories a day) with a small, nimble yet powerful social team are all incredible feats by Narcity.
So, how to balance all of these competing factors and continue to create a social media platform that offers an engaging, relevant and personalized content experience for our followers? Ultimately comes a balance between our unique blend of content curation and automation.
For our Narcity Canada Instagram presence, Narcity Media uses a blend of automated content creation, manual curation and scheduling. We have created a system whereby when a piece of content is published to Narcity.com it immediately triggers a series of automations, that create a social media post template using the article title, image etc and generate a post in our scheduler. From there, the social media team can decide to deploy immediately (if breaking news) or move to a scheduled spot within the next day. In addition, the social team also pulls multiple forms of video content and places them within the content schedule including the aforementioned in-house news video, UGC and creator partnership video. The strategy here is that we are offering a wide variety of news and media to our followers to keep them continually engaged. On any given day the team could publish upwards of 50+ pieces of content to Instagram!
For our Narcity Canada Facebook page, we use a combination of DLVR.it and RSS feeds to ensure that all website content after being published is sent into an article queue and ultimately deployed to our Facebook audience. We use daily curation combined with automatic scheduling to ensure no content “clashes” and is posted at the same time (providing content posting intervals of anywhere from 10-30 minutes) as well as creating space for content variety. Dedicated time slots for the in-house new video, UGC, affiliate content and branded content. In addition, we have seen great success in referral traffic when we repost or “echo” our Facebook content when relevant 36+ hours later at a new time of day. This is also handled automatically.
Lastly, the social team uses our TikTok presence as a place to extend our content vibe into a creator-focused environment. Largely populated with content from our 20+ paid content creators, our TikTok is aimed at brand awareness with a key Gen Z demographic with the goal of converting them ultimately to Narcity readers and followers.
Narcity’s content distribution is further expanded when we leverage our countless local pages for Instagram collaborations between Narcity Canada & Toronto, use live video to grow our audience on Facebook or even partner with creators to gain access to their unique audiences. All in all, creating the best in news/media execution, rivalling any major publisher.
So far in 2021, Narcity Canada social presence has seen some incredible success on platform and referral to our website resulting in:
35 Million Instagram Interactions (likes, comments, shares)
160K+ Instagram follower growth since Jan 1 2021 including a record month of May 2021 with over 30K+ in one month.
3+ Million Facebook Interactions (likes, comments, shares)
49 Million Sessions delivered from Facebook
16 Million Sessions delivered from Instagram
1.1+ Million Sessions delivered from Instagram Stories
970K+ Sessions delivered from Pinterest
In addition, as the social team, our North Star is to grow our digital audience for our content.
Additional results from our Instagram specific reels push included:
70,000 followers gained over a 3-month Q2 period - April to June Q2 2021
Grew account and follower base to surpass multiple competitors in the Canadian media market and grab key market share of engagement and resulting website traffic.
Growth larger than many massive International content publishers - Ex Buzzfeed main account growth from April to June 2021 was just 9,500 followers vs.70,000 for Narcity Canada
Created and posted a staggering 170 Reels videos in Q2 (April - June 2021)
170 Reels in Q2 resulting in 59 Million views, and 1.8M interactions (Likes+Comments)
Average view total of 335K per Reel posted with a top performer of 6.7 million views
Duplicated this strategy to our more local Canadian feeds including Narcity Toronto which we have grown to almost 40,000 followers (from zero) since launch in 2021.
