TURNER POV: The Buried Lede in WSJ’s Facebook Story This Week

The Wall Street Journal published a story this week investigating the confusing world that publishers face when it comes to Facebook analytics. “Is Facebook Driving Less Traffic To Publishers’ Sites?” the headline asks. It’s an important question. As the article notes, “some sites now receive as much as 90% of their traffic from [Facebook].”

But publishers are worried that the social network, which boasts an astonishing 1.55 billion users worldwide, is giving preference to content hosted directly on Facebook, or that traffic will evolve into a “pay-to-play” scenario. All valid concerns for any publisher who relies on Facebook for traffic – and let’s face it, almost every publisher does. But the actual facts behind these concerns are hard to come by.

What’s a publisher to do in the meantime? For us, the buried lede in the WSJ piece came from Joe Speiser, co-founder of LittleThings.com, who said: “The trends in traffic have less to do with Facebook policy and more to do with the virality and quality of content being published.” In other words, don’t post crap. While high-quality content is not the only ingredient in a recipe for Facebook success, it remains a vital one. Obvious? Maybe. But always worth remembering.

Here are three other tips to improve the quality of your content:

Go Inception on your content: Posting delicious looking food, for example, will only get you so far (and so many likes) with your audience. Go deeper. Explore who made the dish, his or her inspiration behind it, and perhaps where the ingredients were sourced from. Remember: it’s the context that truly takes your content to the next level.

Experiment with different mediums: Storytelling comes in all shapes and sizes, and social media networks have adjusted to users' demands for more dynamic, in-stream multimedia storytelling. Mix it up beyond the classic photo-and-text posts with GIFs, short videos, creative infographics, blogs and more to better understand which content types your audiences react to best.

Give people a reason to share (i.e., care): There's a reason why content from some of Facebook’s biggest publishers, like Upworthy, perform so well — they ensure their content has a strong emotional hook. Don’t let your storytelling become devoid of human emotion. Emotion serves as the connective tissue between your brand story and your audience, and is vital to not only getting users to read your content, but care enough to share it with their own followers, as well.