Monday 30th October: LADbible Group’s Jake Strong-Jones on the best use of social platforms

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There’s just under 6 weeks to go until Mx3 AI; a collaboration between Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. We’ll be featuring sessions on AI in local, national, consumer and B2B media, as well as discussions on innovation, developments and regulation.

This week we’re joined by Jake Strong-Jones, Operations Lead at LADbible Group. Jake’s job is to get the best possible performance on all of the youth publisher’s social platforms, from content strategy and distribution to platform relationships and insights.

Jake explained what the ‘Lad’ bit of LADbible looks like in 2023 and how that impacts content strategy. He also talked us through the group’s growing portfolio of media brands including its newest acquisition, the female-founded and focused humour platform Betches.

We talked about social distribution, especially TikTok, growth of longer form video on the platform and whether it’s possible to make any money there. We also got into Jake’s thoughts on how to approach emerging social platforms, leveraging them for growth and the importance of letting brands run their own experiments.

Another very useful post from journalism professor Damian Radcliffe as part of his work examining the background to the local news crisis in the United States and what can be done about it. Here he’s looking at a number of the structural dynamics impacting local news provision including the closure of titles, job losses, issues of diversity and inclusion, as well as news and information deficits.

The collapse of social referrals is a worry, but this is a strong reminder of the importance of building direct relationships. Podcast host Amelia Hruby makes the point that, while existing listeners may engage, social streams are not the best place for podcast discovery. She suggests time spent building a newsletter audience is much more rewarding and we would have to agree.

Of course print is the answer… so long as you are asking the right question. In this blog post outlining discussions at a gathering of 45 independent news publishers in the UK, Philip John wonders if print might factor in the survival of local news publishers. I’d argue that anywhere publishers can harness a tight-knit community of interest, print is a strong addition to the revenue mix.

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