Core Publisher Best Practices

We know that strong digital strategies rely on sustained user engagement. We also know that promoting and exploring user engagement is a topic that's always on your minds, as it is ours. User engagement means not only pages per visitor, but measuring how that visitor interacts and engages with the story. 

One way this intersects with broader distribution of stories is via social sharing. After researching and exploring how to promote social sharing, we've developed new social buttons on post pages that we hope will encourage visitors to your stories to share them with friends. 

So you have a newly designed Core Publisher web site that's responsive and looks beautiful. 

Here are some things to keep in mind when you're creating stories in Core Publisher (or any content management system) to make sure you get the most out of it.

**Refresh this page often for the latest updates.**

A quick head's up on what this is. The Battleground is an aggregation of NPR member stations' content produced during election night. It's curated by the staff at NPR Digital Services, including Eric Athas, Teresa Gorman, Will Snyder, Kim Perry and Erin Teare Martin. The list of participating stations and states is posted at the bottom.

On Tuesday the team here at Digital Services started rolling out an analytics dashboard for Core Publisher. There's a lot of data displayed (beautifully displayed, we should say) and we're going to take a minute to explain why we chose these numbers and how they can help you in your day-to-day editorial process.

A Two-way Street

Madalyn Painter from St. Louis Public Radio recently shared some impressive numbers around their digital audience growth over the past year for their website and audio streams.

Comparing this January to last, our number of unique visitors to the site has increased by 90 percent. Additionally, the number of people listening to our online streams has more than doubled.

Thanks for Nathan from KUT News in Austin, TX for the enthusiastic heads-up on this!

Google recently introduced the ability for businesses and brands to create Google+ (Google Plus) pages, and we suggest that all stations take advantage of this opportunity to connect with users and promote content. This is a great new tool that can prove to be very powerful in gathering and interacting with your listeners and community.

As we all know, one of the goals of Core Publisher is to help you create an active community on your site through your content. One of the easiest ways to use your content to drive traffic is to allow visitors to share it on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Core Publisher harnesses the power of AddThis, one of the most effective online sharing and analytic tools, to allow your users to share your content in ways that you can track.