The News Movement uses social listening to reach a new generation of consumers on social channels
The Challenge
The News Movement (TNM) launched in early 2022 after producing content in beta live for ten months, with a focus on reaching and engaging a generation of people accustomed to consuming news on social platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.
“Our starting point is meeting audiences where they're already consuming news. And right now, that happens to be social. So we needed a tool like Sprinklr that would allow us to tap into the data that's available through the platforms themselves.”
Head of Audience, The News Movement
Because TNM’s goal is to meet its audience where they are — to bring them relevant information in a way that’s simple, accessible, and digestible — it needed a social publishing and listening solution that had access to as many social APIs as possible.
“My job is to make sure that our audience is engaged and that it continues to grow,” explains TNM Head of Audience Valentina Park. “So we wanted to be able to cut data in as many different ways as possible to make sure we’re accomplishing this.”
Park and the TNM team looked for a solution that would:
- Allow them to tap into the data available through the social platforms to understand how people are thinking and talking about news stories and topics
- Enable geographically-distributed editorial leadership and journalists to publish stories and engage with audiences on social channels — all from a common platform.
- Provide customized engagement dashboards to track social presence and performance in order to understand what is driving views and engagement
The Solution
TNM implemented Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform with a strong focus on Social Listening, Social Publishing & Engagement, and listening and engagement dashboards.
Social Listening helps to shape editorial calendar, position content, and enable widest reach
When TNM onboarded to the Sprinklr platform, Park worked closely with the Sprinklr team to set up its Social Listening instance: they built search queries associated with TNM’s editorial pillars and created a list of lead voices to listen to and follow. The goal was for the community engagement manager to be able to track general sentiment of news stories by social platform.
“If we have a big story coming out, we want to know, ‘How are people talking about the topic that story is about? What is the general sentiment of that topic on the social platform we’re targeting?’” says Park. “Having that context is critical.” It can help not only to shape the editorial roadmap, but to provide insight into the best ways to position stories, including which hashtags to use, in order to reach the widest possible audience. The TNM team currently listens across TikTok, Instagram, X, formerly Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.
Social Publishing allows distributed workforce to post from a common platform
Today, TNM editors use Sprinklr to post stories to Instagram, YouTube, X, formerly Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and — soon — TikTok (once custom thumbnails are enabled in the API). As TNM ramps up operations, its goal is to have journalists, themselves, engaged and posting their own content. With Sprinklr, TNM can onboard journalists to the Sprinklr platform, then manage and track their social content and its performance. This will allow for strong brand governance and content oversight from TNM’s editorial team, while enabling each journalist to develop, manage, and nurture their own professional brand.
Custom listening and engagement dashboards
As part of its onboarding, TNM also worked closely with the Sprinklr team to create customized dashboards. This way, Park and team can easily see, in aggregate, how content is performing, which editorial pillars are resonating with audiences, and what’s driving views and engagement. Park says this is particularly important for TNM’s primary channel, TikTok, because Sprinklr pulls in data for a wider date range than can be viewed natively. In total, TNM tracks online conversations related to 15 themes in order to understand more about the topics their audience cares about most.
One unexpected bonus, Park says, is the executive dashboard that provides an updated view of social presence and performance to executives.
“I knew it was something that was available, but I didn't count it as a reason to go with Sprinklr,” she says. “But it's been actually very helpful. Our executives can access the dashboard through the public link without actually needing a seat. And it's very user friendly and flexible.”
The Outcome
Less than six months since launching Sprinklr, Park estimates the platform already saves TNM team 3-4 hours of work per week. But she says the greatest benefit, so far, is related to social data.
“It's given us access to things we didn't previously have, which is historical data to reference our performance beyond 60 days on TikTok,” she says.