Introduction
Social media automation is an important tool for Kraków, Poland-based Tygodnik Powszechny, a small magazine with an impressive reputation. Published on a weekly basis, Tygodnik Powszechny takes great pride in its award-winning journalism.
Tygodnik uses four main channels for content distribution — Facebook, X, Instagram and email newsletters. Responsibility for these is split between their small digital team and editorial staff.
Challenge
- Increase referral traffic from social media
- Decrease workload on a small digital team
- Increase and optimize reshares on Facebook
- Drive subscriber growth
Approach
- Use Echobox automation to automate social sharing
- Employ intelligent AI optimizations to increase traffic and engagement
- Use Echobox’s resharing function to drive additional traffic
The Challenge: Making the most of a small staff and resharing on Facebook
Tygodnik’s digital strategy has one overarching purpose: generating ad and subscription revenues through referral traffic.
Tygodnik’s Head of Digital Expansion, Patryk Stanik, identified a sharing strategy that he believed could help Tygodnik drive more traffic from Facebook. “More than half of the articles that we publish is content that can easily be reshared,” he said. “I read a white paper from Echobox, showing that the third or fourth share of the same article could have even more traffic than the first one.” Tygodnik was therefore keen to implement these insights.
SocialFlow was more expensive and the functionalities weren’t as good as Echobox. It was a no-brainer.
But with a small team covering both social media and email this didn’t prove easy. So they looked for a way to leverage social media automation to reduce pressure on staff and optimize performance.
The Approach: Automate social media posts and reshares
Tygodnik narrowed their search for a social media management tool down to Echobox and SocialFlow, but there was one clear winner. “SocialFlow was more expensive and the functionalities weren’t as good as Echobox. It was a no-brainer.”
With Tygodnik set up on Echobox, they quickly saw the power of its AI automation. “Automation is what works for us”.
I read and weep for our fellow publishers but [declining Facebook traffic] didn’t affect us, and I think that a big chunk of the reason why was Echobox.
With Echobox automating both their social presence and email newsletters, Tygodnik were able to hugely increase the number of posts they were making across multiple social platforms, including resharing their evergreen content.
But increasing social posts alone is no guarantee of increased performance. Posting at the right time and the right volume is key to ensuring the highest possible traffic and engagement. Indeed, our research suggests that Facebook penalizes under- and over-sharing. Allying automation with an AI capable of reverse engineering social media algorithms to understand the best time, cadence and volume to share and reshare, therefore, is the key to what makes Echobox so powerful.
Results: Increased traffic and click rates
Tygodnik’s results with Echobox’s social media and email automation have been impressive, especially when taking into account the challenging environment news publishers face on social networks.
“I read and weep for our fellow publishers,” Stanik said of the declining Facebook traffic that is widespread throughout the industry, “but it didn’t affect us, and I think that a big chunk of the reason why was Echobox.”
There’s this hype about new platforms all the time. I feel like Echobox is a friend who knows what is going on in digital right now and who passes onto me only the things that will really work for me and that I can integrate into my business. I would definitely recommend it.
With Echobox Social Tygodnik has seen its Facebook traffic increase by 19% over the past year, while with Echobox Email its click rates have gone up by a substantial 38%. And perhaps most impressively of all, these results have come with a time saving of around four hours per day.
Conclusion
Tygodnik’s use of Echobox has been a huge success. Safe in the knowledge that their social media presence is being taken care of, Stanik’s team have been able to use these time savings to focus on other activities. “Echobox Social has helped us by just reducing the workload. It lets us grow our subscriber base because we now have the time to take care of it much, much better.”
What has Stanik’s experience of Echobox been? “Hands down it’s probably the best user experience we’ve had with all of our external solutions.”
And finally, would he recommend other publishers switch to Echobox? Stanik was unequivocal:
“I mean, It works! It made our job easier. It helped us save time, it helped us find new readers and to engage old readers more often. There’s this hype about new platforms all the time. I feel like Echobox is a friend who knows what is going on in digital right now and who passes onto me only the things that will really work for me and that I can integrate into my business. I would definitely recommend it.”
