Why is lager more popular than beer lovers would admit? ????
We published a new data-driven IG story at @TheEconomist and I would *love* to know what you think about our latest effort to bring #datajournalism on the platform
Financial publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times have long understood the power of data visualisation to engage social media audiences. This tweet by the FT in 2015 – an animation of a graphic showing the erosion of middle class income in the US – was its most popular that year.
And my friend Mark Jones with the World Economic Forum told me that by simply including a chart or a graph in a social media share that it performed 400 percent better than a simple link share.
I see this more of an evolution of a trend and a new data point that emphasises something that we already now, but it is definitely something to emulate if you are already working with data visualisation.
Thanks again to my subscribers, and if you have a story that you think should be included in the newsletter, share it with me on Twitter @kevglobal.
I’m back from a much-needed mini-break so Tuesday is the new Monday, well at least for me this week. Up first today in today’s media newsletter is a review of a talk by Adam Davison, the Head of Insight and Data Science at The Economist. The great write-up by Esther Kezia Thorpe looks at the evolution of The Economist’s paid content strategy over the last 20 years. This really builds on the post I highlighted last week that pointed out that businesses that get better are businesses that get smarter. They are constantly working and refining their model.
The killer quote by Davison was this one in which the business was trying to evaluate the trade-offs to certain business decisions whether that was advertising versus reader revenue or the number of articles that a reader had access to before hitting the paywall. Davison said:
Historically, we’ve not been very data-driven when evaluating these trade-offs basically. It’s been very much sort of…business strategy gut feel, maybe a little bit of data here and there, but probably not used anything like as effectively as it could have been. So I think with this latest transition, I really wanted to try to do this the right way, use data to be as informed as possible when we made this decision.
Read the whole piece, but the other thing that really stood out was how their data strategy has changed. The Economist has had to break down data silos in their business. They had data and talented analysts across the business, but they worked in isolation.
I have seen this in the work that I do. Editorial teams have data, usually quantitative, but marketing teams often have more information about the habits and preferences of audiences. Both pools of data can be useful to the other team.
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter, and if you haven’t already, you can get the full list of stories in your inbox. Subscribe here, and if there is a story that you think should be included, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal.
