Introduction
Founded in 1903, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) is Hong Kong’s newspaper of record and one of Asia’s most prominent English-language papers. Throughout its long history, SCMP has remained dedicated to providing objective, balanced reporting on China and Hong Kong. Notably, the group’s coverage of the political unrest in Hong Kong recently earned it the award for “General Excellence in Online Journalism” at the 2020 Online Journalism Awards.
As an English-language publication with an international audience, SCMP relies on digital channels – social media in particular – to reach readers around the world and engage them wherever they are.
Challenge
- Distribute content to global audiences on social media
- Efficiently manage social media publishing across platforms
- Provide continuous social coverage when 24/7 staffing isn’t possible
Approach
- Use intelligent automation from Echobox
- Let Echobox optimize post timing
- Automate curation and posting on Twitter to save time
- Maintain 24/7 social presence across platforms
- Use A/B Testing to maximize Facebook clicks and engagement
Challenge
“SCMP aims to be Asia’s leading news publisher that serves a global audience, and part of our goal is to present our content to people from different countries on their preferred platforms. This includes audiences following us on social media, making it a crucial distribution channel,” says Shea Driscoll, Social Media Editor at SCMP.
With social media playing such a key role in distributing content, SCMP needed an efficient way to publish across social platforms. The group previously used Buffer for social media publishing, but it required them to manually manage posts and their timing. SCMP instead sought a solution that would facilitate the manual aspects of sharing on social media, freeing the team to focus on other high-impact activities, such as leveraging video content to drive engagement.
“A key consideration we make is deciding what content works best on which social media platform. Social video is an important and growing area that has contributed to increased traction and consumption,” notes Shea. “Our social media team follows trending video content from China that has universal appeal which is showcased on appropriate social media platforms to drive engagement with viewers.”
Approach
Looking for a more streamlined experience, SCMP moved to Echobox, the world’s first social media solution built from the ground up for publishers and powered by artificial intelligence. Publishers around the globe use Echobox to achieve greater social reach and automate their social media activity.
Echobox’s intelligent algorithms optimize the timing of SCMP’s posts by predicting the best minute to share content for maximum traffic. Every few seconds, Echobox recalculates every possible posting sequence to determine the optimal share times. This eliminates the guesswork and vastly reduces manual involvement for SCMP when determining
post times, resulting in significant time savings and better post performance.
“Timing optimization has been a real perk and something I now take for granted. Optimizing includes an experimental element that helps find new optimal timing for your posts,” says Shea, who regularly uses the Time Slot feature in Echobox, which allows publishers to indicate a custom posting period for an article. Echobox will then share the article at the optimal time within said period.
“Maximizing social reach for global audiences requires an appreciation for posting optimization that determines the best times to achieve high levels of engagement. Echobox’s algorithm and time slot functionality removes one variable from the equation – I don’t have to manually manage time slots, pushing stories back and forth in relation to each other, but instead can just post in a time period I’m comfortable with, and move on,” Shea explains.
SCMP uses Echobox’s intelligent automation in other ways to save time while expanding social reach and coverage across platforms. On Twitter, for example, Shea and his team let Echobox determine which articles to share, the text to use and the optimal time to tweet.
“We were finding very little traction, or value add, when manually tweeting or ‘crafting’ bespoke tweet text. It wasn’t giving us any significant uplift in engagement, or click-throughs,” recalls Shea.
Consequently, SCMP decided to reduce its manual involvement on Twitter and instead let Echobox automate all tasks related to tweeting. “Given the small size of our team, we wanted to focus on areas where we could really move the needle, so Echobox automation helps to take a big load off.”
With Echobox, SCMP can guarantee continuous coverage for social audiences in different time zones and geographies as it breaks the latest news from Hong Kong and China to the rest of the world. Even outside of business hours, Echobox ensures a 24/7 social presence with intelligently curated content posted at the optimal time.
“We are targeting readers in all parts of the world now, especially the US, which is of course in a very different time zone from our headquarters in Hong Kong,” says Shea. “We don’t always have the manpower for 24/7 staffing. Echobox has helped to provide coverage at hours when we wouldn’t be able to cover otherwise.”
Shea and his team also use Echobox’s built-in organic A/B testing for Facebook, which enables the testing of different headlines, messages, images or videos to find which versions are most engaging to audiences. By experimenting with different versions of Facebook posts, SCMP can optimize post content for strong performance. “A/B Testing in Echobox is very useful in testing hypotheses and just eking out whatever we can from our Facebook posts, maximizing clicks and engagement,” Shea notes.
Results
Moving to Echobox had an immediate impact on SCMP’s social media performance: in the first 6 weeks, SCMP recorded a 56% increase in pageviews from Facebook and a 26% increase in Facebook’s share of total traffic. Engagement on Facebook also grew by 50% during this period. SCMP’s Twitter traffic equally saw a boost, with pageviews from Twitter rising 50%.
“These are very heartening results and completely justify the investment in Echobox,” says Shea.
By letting Echobox manage the more manual aspects of social media publishing, Shea and the rest of the social media team save an estimated 31 hours per day – the equivalent of 3.9 full-time employees.
“Saving that much in work hours has been fantastic for a team that remains lean, and any uplift we have gotten from a tool that we use means that that tool is paying off,” Shea adds.
Looking back at his publication’s journey on social media, Shea says Echobox has played a key role in helping SCMP achieve such impressive growth. “SCMP’s Facebook following in particular has grown 10x in the last 3.5 years, growing from about 400,000 to 4 million last month. Echobox has been a part of that journey, helping us post our content in the most optimal way.”
Conclusion
As SCMP continues to deliver news to social audiences all over the world, Shea says his team will aim to place an even greater focus on data and testing. “With more time, we’d love to be more rigorous in implementing A/B tests on the posts we do, and investigate analytics more to figure out what’s working and what isn’t,” he notes.
For other publishers looking to boost performance while freeing up time for social media editors, Shea recommends Echobox: “Echobox has saved me and my team a lot of time, and I trust that its algorithm helps what SCMP is trying to achieve on social media.”
