As a mom, YouTube is an ever-present part of my life. (I will never understand unboxing.) But as a journalist, YouTube has been pretty invisible. This is true for a lot of us. Maybe we work with words, audio, photos, or video, but we probably aren’t thinking about a social-first strategy for our work. (Some of you are, I know. I see you.)
But there’s a lot to learn from the social media platforms that the youngest people in our communities are the most engaged with. After a year of work with three local newsrooms, my colleagues at Poynter’s VidSpark just published a playbook for social video strategy. You can find best practices, case studies from The Minneapolis Star
Tribune, GBH News and 10 Tampa Bay.
These aren’t guides to show you how to weave TikTok dances into your reporting. They employ investigative journalism, civics and breaking news. And most of us need to learn some of VidSpark’s biggest lessons, regardless of our platform or medium.
In her introduction to the playbook, my colleague Ahsante Bean, Poynter’s editor and program manager for video strategy, wrote about taking a community-building approach. It’s one that grows audiences slowly over time in a way that’s sustainable and builds relationships.
That matters for all the work we’re doing, not just social video. It takes building communities of people who care about what you’re doing, want to see your work and feel invested in it. That takes understanding the audiences you’re trying to reach, getting the details around presentation and discovery right, and making it easy for people to find and explore what you’ve made. It’s NOT about clicks or virality.
Bean told me the biggest shift for the newsrooms that spent the last year with VidSpark, which is supported by the Google News Initiative, was understanding how people consume video content and prioritizing the viewership experience. I’d argue that’s true for all journalism. How are people reading/listening/watching local news and how can we make that a place they want to return to?
Bean learned how in tune local journalists are with their communities and that they are often not included in the national vitriol around “the media.” That offers a huge opportunity to show up in people’s feeds, wherever they are, she said, and show the value of local journalism.
Most of us won’t build viral YouTube channels or massive audiences in our communities overnight. It’s all a long game, Bean said.
“Trust is earned, right? Put in the time, care and attention. It pays off in the long run.”
Yes. I will like, subscribe and follow all of that.
Screenshots, Poynter's VidSpark
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