A legacy newspaper’s winning approach to social media

With around 70 million users, Facebook is the top social media platform in the Philippines. Facebook rules the internet in this country. If we wanted to stay relevant in the digital age, we needed to be big on Facebook. In the last few years, our social media platforms have been growing exponentially. We now have 7.2 million followers across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and an average of 40 million monthly Facebook video views — the biggest among our print competitors.

It took months and years of experimentation, collaboration, and social listening to get here. Contrary to what others might think, our team didn’t have a ton of money to throw around. We only needed to maximize our resources, develop a data-driven content strategy that drives growth, and work hand-in-hand with our journalists on the ground to uphold our brand’s quality of journalism that was forged 35 years ago. 

Finding our voice

As a print media, building a presence in a platform already crowded with news publishers is both challenging and exciting. We saw potential in our reporting and we know what our journalists and producers can bring to the table. We just have to find the right voice that would define our personality online and cut through the fierce competition for attention.

To stand out and make a lasting impression online, we deviated from the cold and rigid personality people usually associate with news media. We want our online persona to be approachable but still aligned with our editorial principles: Critical but fair, relatable but responsible, entertaining but valuable.

By keeping these principles in mind when crafting our messaging across our social media platforms, we were able to earn the trust and loyalty of our online audience.

Maximizing our resources

The amount of content that our competitors publish day in, day out is something we can’t keep pace with given our relatively limited resources. So we designed a workflow that would streamline our social newsgathering. Using CrowdTangle, a content discovery and analytics tool, we built dashboards and live displays across beats we want to monitor online — from local government units and lawmakers to celebrities, personalities, and opinion leaders. 

When stories unfold, our talented team of photojournalists is the first to arrive at the scene. But because of the limited space in print, their photos sometimes do not make it to the day’s issue. To remedy this, we included their content in our distribution strategy. This allowed us to deliver timely and up-to-the-minute developments to our audience when breaking news happens.

We also take into account niche content in our monitoring: may it be about a TV series or a new film, pageants, sustainable living, animal rights, astronomy, and whatnot. This approach is anchored on our belief that the audience on social media is big enough for us to find people who would take interest in each story that we do. Tapping into these uncharted territories also helped the management develop new verticals for its digital transition.

Lastly, we leveraged on the power of user-generated content. The heartwarming, lighthearted, and sometimes heart-wrenching types of content are the top drivers of conversation on social media. We make sure that our team gets the first dibs on these stories while ensuring best practices in verifying the content, reaching out to and interviewing sources, and securing permission to use them in our reporting. 

Understanding our audience

When we were starting to build our identity on social media, we listed down what drives people to interact and share a piece of content. We observed that stories presented in a format that is easy on the eye and can be easily understood when flashed on the newsfeed generate better engagement and interactions. With this in mind, we repackaged our print news stories into a square format art card that highlights the headline, lead, and photo. We saw an increase in our interaction rate with this strategy which is now being adopted by our colleagues in the industry.

We also applied the same principle in all our social media executions and recognized how people process information differently. Our content lives in a multi-dimension, multi-resolution platform. We believe it is important for news outlets to explore, experiment, and embrace innovations because without these, the journalism that we do risks losing relevance and impact.

Investing in video

Since last year, The Philippine STAR has been aggressive in publishing video content more than ever. At the height of the pandemic, we saw a spike in our follower count on Facebook as people online turned to traditional media for accurate and reliable information on COVID-19.

With a remote team structure, we produced a digital video series covering the COVID-19 pandemic and from there, we increased the amount of video content that we publish. We premiere two long-form videos a week, but as much as possible, we also try to stay flexible enough to accommodate breaking news, a trend, or a video that is going viral.

In the years to come, The Philippine STAR will continue to explore storytelling formats, leverage on emerging platforms, and ultimately conquer the digital landscape. As journalists and digital creators, it is embedded in our DNA to innovate. It is our duty to adapt to a platform that is native to millions of Filipinos. Instead of mocking it, we strive to make rules for it, be creative, and be pioneers.