Last week’s series on news topicals generated these examples from KNPN-LD, the Fox affiliate in St. Joseph, Mo., owned by the News-Press & Gazette Co. “The most success we’ve seen recently on Facebook,” wrote Christian Mengel, KNPN’s promotions manager, “is just by posting a graphic and asking viewers what they think it means. The example […]
Last week’s series on news topicals generated these examples from KNPN-LD, the Fox affiliate in St. Joseph, Mo., owned by the News-Press & Gazette Co.
“The most success we’ve seen recently on Facebook,” wrote Christian Mengel, KNPN’s promotions manager, “is just by posting a graphic and asking viewers what they think it means. The example below was posted with the question ‘what do you think the green dots represent? We’ll have the answer tonight at 9 p.m. on Fox 26 KNPN.’
“It generated more reactions, comments and conversations than probably 95% of our posts. No matter what their guesses were, they knew it was something that clearly impacts our city, and therefore cared enough to want to know the answer.
“Since we provided no additional clues, they couldn’t Google the answer. They knew they had to watch if they really wanted to find out. The mystery alone was enough for a large chunk of our Facebook audience to watch our newscast.”
Mengel also shared an example from the station’s May sweeps last year.
“Our morning anchor, Alex Flippin, went exploring some old underground tunnels below our city. We decided to do this story because it was based on generations of rumors about where they were and what they were used for. It was pretty non-traditional when it comes to ‘news’ stories, so we felt the promotions could be non-traditional, too.
“Through putting these videos on Facebook, what we got was the whole city commenting, calling or messaging us about where they know the best tunnels are, or what their grandpa said it was used for when they were little.
“All of this attention and conversations was happening before the story even aired.
“The feedback was enough to make our seasoned reporter feel nervous about how viewers would react after they saw the story. I don’t believe that kind of hype could have happened had we only aired promos on TV. For that particular story, in that particular sweeps period, it was the first time our Facebook promotions out-performed our on-air promotions.”
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