Social networks do not compete with local media websites, they rather complement them. How to increase the number of subscribers by properly working with a social network? We, the editorial office of Yampil.INFO, have learned from our experience that the right actions with information increase the number of subscribers much faster than any other actions.
We used pay insufficient attention to social networks and messengers in the Yampil information agency. Because we saw them as competitors to our website, which had a good reach and audience trust. When the war broke out, it was too late because a group of regional telegram channels was formed on the market, which quickly became popular.
For about a year, we tried to promote our channel, but all our attempts were unsuccessful. In 11 months, we had only 700 new subscribers. There was one spike when an extraordinary event happened in our region, which we covered. Then the audience grew to 1,000 people, but it was rather accidental.
When the publication started working within the framework of the project supported by the Ukrainian Media Business Association (UMBA) Effective Local Media: Digital Development for Community Engagement with the financial support of the European Union, we received weekly training and individual consultations with our mentor Borys Rodiyevskyi. After the first consultations, we realized that what we did was mostly incorrect, and our attempts to make the Telegram channel look like an Instagram account with beautiful photos of Yampil were in vain.
Instead, we learned the rules of working with this messenger, in particular, about the advantages that telegram bots provided. This knowledge allowed us to increase our audience to 1,500 subscribers in just a week. In particular, when we received an exclusive piece of news about the renaming of settlements in our area, we decided to post it not on the site, as always, but on the Telegram channel, and exclusively for subscribers. This gave a result of +300 subscribers in a day.
We repeated this several times and got an additional 500 subscribers. Today we continue this, and have already set ourselves the task of reaching the mark of 2,000 subscribers by the end of July. We will share our achievements and discoveries in the next article, stay tuned. We will also be glad to learn about the experience of our colleagues: tell your stories on the Editorial Portal.
Author: Oleksandr Solomko, editor of Yampil.INFO
The publication was prepared with the financial support of the European Union. Its content is the sole responsibility of the Ukrainian Media Business Association and does not necessarily reflect the position of the European Union.