The drive amongst publishers worldwide is to increase audience engagement and insight, building on first-party data and analytics to build better content and commercial models.

If you have been to any of the large events by organisations like INMA over the last couple of years, the “E word” has been at the top of the agenda alongside AI. INMA’s own Greg Piechota and the Readers First Initiative do a superb job of covering what’s working.

Engagement beefs up commercial models and brings your audiences closer to you, which is critical as social and tech platforms nakedly set out to keep users on their side of the fence.

While big talks and presentations target leadership and technology teams, the harassed journalists creating content often face the question of how to balance increased engagement with increased work.

Editorial budgets are not renowned for rising without reason and often pose a chicken-and-egg conundrum to writers and editors: deliver more engagement to get more funding.

So, how do we increase reader interaction and insight, without just multiplying the amount of work the content team needs to do?

At Glide, we work with editorial teams as much as we work with commercial and tech teams, so see all sides of the equation. Our Glide Nexa platform is helping make the tech challenges go away by connecting information better, but any feature development inside a site or app needs something to incentivise readers to use it. And that’s the secret to engagement.

Here are some quick wins for editorial teams wondering how to get extra screen time or engagement from audiences with barely an extra keystroke. This isn’t inclusive of every method, and many are starters to underpin a planned strategy and get good testing under your belt. But crucially, they give back more than they take.

Favourites

Allowing readers to mark pages or articles as “favourite” is not much more complex than an on-site or in-app bookmark.

It’s a small start, but it opens the door to sophisticated reader-curated content experiences and content personalisation based on preferences. It also sends a huge message to audience and content teams that something is hitting the mark with readers.

Best of all, this one requires no extra content except perhaps home page-ready shorter headlines — but you should be doing that anyway.

Editorial difficulty: 0/5

“Save for later” and bookmarks

A reader in a hurry can pin an article for later inside their profile: There’s no need to remember each piece, share it to themselves, or save it to a reader app like Pocket/Instapaper or browser-based reading lists.

Not only does this encourage remaining logged-in, it also feeds your analytics pot to help better hone in on similar reading suggestions which the other “save” methods wouldn’t tell you.

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

“Follow this topic”

Allowing a user to follow a content genre or theme sends huge signals to your audience and editorial team that this person really likes something.

This is good for commercial potential and showing what people want more of. It’s another encouragement to stay logged-in, leads beautifully into segmented newsletters, and is great for research about personalisation and self-curation.

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

“Follow the author”

Like following a topic, allow following of writers.

There are lots of benefits here: It signals to your audience team and writers the kinds of writers they want more of, amplifies author profile pages (which is great for SEO), and is a really good reason for a reader to sign-up for a notification or alert a la “tell me when this writer posts again.”

Again, no extra content is needed at all — but you have a rich target audience if you want to start experimenting with additional and exclusive content.

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Newsletter sign-up

Absolutely nothing extra is needed here in terms of content: Just let readers choose to receive collations or summaries by e-mail on a schedule.

You don’t need premium content, but e-mails are great at transitioning free customers to paid if you have the right tools to do it and are satisfying the age-old test: Is this something people would pay for?

With regard to fears that newsletters undermine site traffic, aside from being more valuable than an unknown reader anyway, newsletter hounds tend to be much more engaged and read more on sites not less. Obviously, resist the temptation to spam people!

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Offer them “ad-free” experiences

How do you get readers to sign-up and sign-in if you aren’t in a position to offer any of the above? You could simply turn off ads for a logged-in user.

For an ad-supported site, you have to make the calculation for the trade off in page impressions versus the value of having a user who is engaged enough to give you an e-mail address, but it can quickly give you a mailing list for future newsletters or targeted content.

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Comments or feedback

Comments are rocketing in importance for signalling what users care about. They are also increasing in their own value to readers keen to see what’s being said about something and what other readers might add to a story. This is why AI engines are actively scouring comments now.

As with the above suggestions it adds nothing to the editorial burden of extra content. In fact, having a place to see reader insight into a topic can be gold for future content planning.

Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Polls and surveys

Being able to add a poll or survey to an article is great at encouraging engagement, and it needs little from an editorial standpoint.

At its most basic, a simple yes/no vote will work. However, you can go further with more probing questions, and whatever time is spent creating them is rewarded with the ability to reflect on the poll outcome in another article.

Editorial difficulty rating: 1/5

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