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How Reach plc hit 100 million followers across its social channels

The UK’s largest regional publisher has hit a major milestone in its social strategy – but its Engagement Director Dan Russell explains that the ‘big number’ is far from the end of the journey.

It has become clear over the past few years that publishers are being much more selective about their use of social media than they once were. Gone are the days of publishing to a platform for the sake of it.

Instead, media businesses are appraising each platform in terms of the specific returns they get from publishing to them. TikTok, for example, might be best used for ecommerce, while Instagram is best for building brand awareness. It isn’t a firehose spray-and-pray approach any more; it’s far more considered.

So when Reach plc hit 100 million followers across all its social channels, the brands’ Engagement Director Dan Russell was celebratory, but forward-looking. On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, he explains: “You can’t just stop there and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got this big number, which has grown really well’. We need to also try and unlock that audience. And to unlock that audience, you have to do a bit of a dance [with the platforms].”

He notes that publishers have to follow the platforms’ lead. The hard-won lesson from the early days of social distribution – that publisher and platform priorities will never run in perfect parallel – means that social teams have to adapt to changing algorithms regularly. “Facebook used to be quite easy, but you used to be able to put content out there, and it would go and go and go,” Russell says. “That’s not the case anymore, and you have to be more strategic. You have to understand how the algorithms work.”

He notes that even with those strictures, the Daily Express saw a 92% increase in traffic to its website from Facebook in January compared to the previous year. Similarly, the Manchester Evening News’ referral traffic was up 37% versus the same period.

Reach plc is being considered in how it approaches each platform. As an example Russell points out that if the publisher commits 10 social team members to a TikTok account, the following will grow – “but actually, how do we make that pay?” That return could be as a result of revenue versus TikTok shops, an advertising return, or even referrals back to the brand. The important thing is to establish which return the brand is seeking to achieve.

He states that while it’s “extremely valuable for brand” in that you can reach a youth audience on the platform, “it really is a tightrope of weighing up ‘we need to be over here’ [versus] ‘how do we make something of it?’”

Universal lessons from centralised distribution

Even with the different capabilities and priorities of each platform, Russell notes that there are universal approaches to audience development and community growth that can be applied across the entire Reach plc portfolio.

For example, lessons around community growth on WhatsApp can be transferred to the relatively similar channels functionality on Instagram.

But Reach is an enormous publisher, with many newspapers and sub-brands sitting underneath it. As a result Russell says he has the pleasurable – if challenging – task of sitting at the nexus of the teams, to disseminate the lessons learned by each title.

“We’ve got a structure now which helps us pivot,” he explains. “We’ve got well over 1000 social media accounts, and being able to do things quickly and change things can be hard. So our newsrooms will have individual audience teams, and centrally, we have audience teams as well – which we call our distribution team. So they have tasks, or they can go [into specific] newsrooms.”

That also means that, if an experiment at one title doesn’t work, similar experiments can be halted or altered elsewhere. Mistakes could be replicated without that new structure, in which a centralised distribution team can feed back, and keep an eye on wider algorithm changes etc. Russell says: “The expectation, though, is that we don’t waste time, we don’t waste resources, and everything is done with data.

“For me, the best insight is, actually, ‘don’t do that’, because that’s really definitive.”

WhatsApp and community

Russell cites WhatsApp as an example of a platform that has benefited from that approach to distribution.

He states that the Reach team recognised the potential of the messaging platform when they initially experimented with WhatsApp. However, at the time, tech limitations and restrictions around use of consumer data stymied their attempts to create viable strategies for growth.

Since then, however, the Meta-owned platform has rolled out a number of new tools for community development that have allowed Reach to tap into that potential. Its Channels functionality, for example, allows for one-way messaging from publisher to audience, perfect for people looking to stay abreast of a given topic. Communities, by contrast, bring users together under related topic-based groups, allowing for more granular sharing of information and community chatter.

“January was our best month ever from WhatsApp,” Russell shared. “Just to give you a scale of the sort of engagement that we’re getting – we’ve got around 4 million referrals to our website from 300,000 people in our communities. We’ve got about two and a half million people on Channels, and we got around a million referrals from those two and a half million people. So it’s an out-and-out success for us, and we don’t have anything which is engaged with quite in the same way.”

He points out that messaging apps, unlike many social channels, are opt-in. Where users ‘trip over’ content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, they expect relevance and timeliness on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

“We’ve had success previously with the Bristol Balloon Fiesta community, and that success is because of the nature of hot air balloons. You don’t know when they’re actually going to launch them. We’re going to tell people ‘it’s a good chance it’s today’, or ‘it’s not today’ And people genuinely like that.

“But if you tell them, ‘Oh, it happened an hour ago’… the gallery of pictures is nice, but actually they want to know when to look up.”

It all goes back to the more deliberate social strategy to which Reach now ascribes. It would be all-too-easy to push every piece of news out to WhatsApp users within Reach’s communities – but that isn’t what users expect from that platform.

More importantly for publishers, it is an example of a media business appraising what it can get in return for its presence on a social platform – in this case referrals – rather than simply being on a platform for the sake of it.

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More good reads from the week:

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